I believe it does have an o/s, if so, are there any alternatives?

You can still plug it in and get stuff off of it. If it's partitioned then you can grab whatever you want off the partitions. Provided they are both of course formated to NTFS.

Hook it up and set your BIOS to boot from the drive you have now. You will see. Be a good experience for you.

Again, Bob thanks for all the help, just so I have right, I set the Bios to boot from the existing hard drive or the one I want to get the info from?, Do I transfer it to the existing hard drive, if so, what is the process?

I hook the drive up and go into the BIOS and make sure i'm booting to my pc's OS drive. Go out of the BIOS and let it boot up. After it's booted up i use explorer to open folders etc and place the stuff i want in folders (or however you want to do it) that i want to keep.

Now if you are expecting to get apps that you had running on the older drive then no. You will have to get the .exe's to run them on your new drive. You can only get/use files and folders of stored stuff. I other words you cannot take Nero off of the drive in Program Files or Programs and put it on your new drive and expect it to run. But you can take Nero's .exe off and reload it on new drive.

Hope this makes sense..

Maybe Cressida has some comments?

Still here ! Will you put that 2nd hard drive back in the old computer once you're done transferring data from it to your new PC, durkinjt? If so, maybe you shouldn't risk booting from it in the new PC, because that'll mess up the existing XP installation on there, which is set up for the old PC specifically. You must be 110% sure to boot from your newly insalled Windows XP, and not from the old drive in this case.

Unless it's a really large amount of data that you need to transfer, I would consider using other options for this, like USB storage or CD/DVD discs (or even a network cable between the two PC's, if you'd like to learn how to do this). Like Bob said, it's a big no-no to transfer your old Program Files from one Windows installation to another - you'll have to reinstall those programs from scratch on the new PC. The data you can transfer is usually stuff like My Documents, Internet browser favorites, E-mail client mailbox, and some other user settings.

If you don't need to put that hard disk back in the old PC (and consequently don't need to use the Windows install that's on there anymore), there's not much you can do wrong. Just connect it to SATA port 2, 3 or 4 (your new HDD should be on SATA1 as mentioned previously) and check for its presence in Disk Management, after booting into your new XP installation.

Cressida, I must have done something wrong, I hooked the old hard drive up in the other computer, rebooted, now it does'nt recognize my Dvd drives. Took it out and still can't get the Dvds to operate.

Any help?

Hi durkinjt,

I don't know what happened exactly. You hooked up the old hard drive in the new PC, but the PC still booted from the new hard drive, is that correct? That shouldn't have changed anything with regards to the DVD drives, so I'm as confused as you are.

If you go into Device Manager, you can right-click and "Uninstall" the IDE Channels (under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers) and have them redetected and installed after rebooting the PC. Maybe this would help to get the drives back.