Two diff hdd, built on two diff OS's, co-exist on one machine?

[Andrew Mitcham]

I have no idea where I should be asking this. It relates to both hw & sw. I will ask here and, if not appropriate, perhaps someone can kindly redirect me to a better place to ask.

Background:
I had an HP pc (the model escapes me at present, and I just recycled the bulk of it last weekend) whose cpu or mb evidently failed on it about a year ago. It was out of warranty, and the mb was out of stock and discontinued. So I pretty much did nothing to fix it.

Because I had alot of information on this pc's drive that I wanted to keep, I considered changing drive jumpers and adding it as a slave drive on another (generic) pc that I have. But no one could tell me if doing this would hose the drive if the bios for the pc I was connecting to was different (not compatable?) with the pc this drive was built on. So rather than take the risk, I simply held onto the drive.

As a Christmas present recently, I received a Model SR5250NX Compaq Presario. Now I am, again, considering attaching this.

Old PC:
OS: Windows XP
Disk Drive: WD Protégé WD800EB - 80 GB - ATA-100

New PC:
OS: Windows Vista
Disk Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 320-GB

Questions:
- Can these two hdd co-exist on the Vista machine?
- Will connecting the old pc's WD drive to the new pc effect (destroy?) its data?
- Are there any alternatives I should consider to recover the information on the old hdd?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

-Andrew

[Phil.Howell · Accepted solution]

the easiest option is to buy a "USB disk enclosure", put your old XP disk in it, and then plug it in to a usb port on the Vista machine.
(I have done this with IDE disks, just make sure your enclosure is an ATA one)
Phil

[Jules]

No Problem. You will have to boot into the bios after you install it to tell the c which disk to boot off.
No data will be destroyed.
This is a very common thing for people to do to retrieve their old data.

[Andrew Mitcham]

> the easiest option is to buy a "USB disk enclosure", put your old XP disk in it, and then plug it in to a usb port on the Vista machine.
(I have done this with IDE disks, just make sure your enclosure is an ATA one)

Excellent idea! I purchased a 3.5" IDE to USB 2.0 enclosure and had the drive hooked up in <15 mins. Vista recognized the drive w/o having to install drivers, and I'm accessing old drive data I haven't seen in over a year!

Thanks again!