HDD Advice please

[Attila the Bun]

My new system seems nice and stable so far. But what I would like to know is can I take the HDD from my old rig and fit it in my new rig for the purposes of transferring all my files, I was going to use DVDs but it is amazing how much stuff you can accumulate over 5 years especially as the girlfriend has spent months scanning in her photos. The old HDD is running XP Pro the new HDD is running 7 Pro. Now I'm fairly sure that I've read somewhere that this shouldn't be a problem but I would just like to confirm I'm correct in my thinking before I carry out the changes.

[stavroshamster]

I don't think it should be a problem.

I have a dual boot XP Home/7 Pro partition and can access all my XP stuff (I think - definitely all the non-system files anyhow). I'm sure it's the same if they were on physically separate HDDs.

[Norman121]

Yeah, you should have no problems with this. If you're connecting both HDDs up at the same time, just make sure it boots to the one you have 7 running on, then you should be able to access the old drive just as any secondary drive and transfer files at your leisure.

If you're not going to use the old drive for anything, it might be worth reformatting it and keeping it in there for some extra storage - after you've transferred across your files of course.

[CaptainCrash]

There should be no problem with physically plugging in the old HDD and having Win7 read the filesystem, but you *may* need to take ownership of the files in your old profile folders before you can actually get to them.

It's (relatively) easily sorted, and the issue may not arise anyway, but I thought I'd better just mention it so you don't get too alarmed if you see an "Access Denied" message...

[Attila the Bun]

If you're not going to use the old drive for anything, it might be worth reformatting it and keeping it in there for some extra storage - after you've transferred across your files of course.

I'm going to leave it in my old rig so that when the kids want to play games I still have internet access. Or more importantly, if I'm playing games, watching films or doing some work the girlfriend can fire up the old one.

[peterb]

You could get a USB caddy and copy the files over that way, or if both computers are networked, just set up a share and copy them over the network.