Transfering hard drive to hard drive... Any advice?

Hello All.

I am about to transfer a hard drive to a new computer, and was wondering if there was any special thing i should look out for? I think the guys old hard drive i'm working on is less than a gig, but he wants all his old files onto his new computer.. I figured i could just piggy back the two HD's, and copy and paste in windows? Am i correct?

Let me know if anybody has better advice or know's the best way to do this. Thanks a lot.

The Knight

 

is there a os on the old hard drive ? are you trying save the os if there is one ? if not than installing the old drive as slave and using copy and paste will work fine .

 

not trying to save the os... his computer is ancient!!! but he just wants his files... so installing the old HD as slave and the new one as master, and copy paste will work eh? Excellent.

Thanks for the help!!! i'll let ya know how it goes

 

in this case the machine will detect the os on his old drive and will want to boot from that drive . this can cause a problem ! is there anyway you can burn what he wants saved to a disc or few discs ? with a older machine like this it most likely will not do dual boot to help with this problem . norton ghost is a option here as stated above or some other image software .

 

Ok.. update.

I removed the old HD which BTW is running windows 98, and put it into his newer P3 Windows XP system. I just used the 40 pin IDE that were there for the piggy back, but it didn't work. It would boot up from the 98 HD and wouldn't even register the XP HD. Still following? Ok.

So i removed the 98 HD, and connected the XP HD back, and here's what i ran into... it would boot up in dos (strange?) and go thru the prompts and then I can't get past this: "Verifying DMI pool data." I don't know what DMI is, and how to just get XP to boot up as normal. Have i ruined his computer? or what?

Let me know what ya think.