OK a bit of a techie question

[Racket_Man]

my last PC (an e-machine with a decent processor, harddrive, memory burners, etc.) started to bite the bullet back in Jan. and I really did not want to spend the money to get it fixed. and I wanted to upgrade the DVD/CD burner processor memory and a few other things as well. I had XP home on it.

BestBuy had a good deal on a HP Pavillion with all of th efeatures I wanted but the problem was it only came with Vista. OK I bite the bullet and get the machine. not too bad I can live with it. now my old machine had died. I believe either the heat sensor or the power supply died.

I want to hook up the hard drive from my old XP machine to my new machine. yes I do know you have to set some jumpers so the new drive is the slave and not the boot disk. my question is is there any potential problems accessing the old drive hooked up inside the new machine running Vista. I still have a lot of stuff stored on that drive that I want to copy off or archive onto DVD/CD.

any suggestions????

[Rapscallion]

Moved to tech help - plenty of people willing to help here!

Rapscallion

[Racket_Man]

thanks for putting it in the right place.

[JustADude]

Shouldn't be any problems, as long as you make sure that your old HD is set to slave. It'll have the boot files on it, but you won't actually be touching them, so you can wipe them out and use the extra storage space... or you could set up a dual-boot system, whatever tickles your fancy.

[Sandman]

Another thing, many HD's that come in the computers are SATA. You need to go into your BIOS and tell it that your SATA is your primary, as no matter how you have your jumpers, your BIOS will default to the IDE Hard drive.