External hard drive enclosure kit question

watisdis

watisdis

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I recently bought a new pc this weekend due to the untimely death of my old motherboard. Now, while I did backup the most important stuff on a regular basis, some other less important (but still desired) things are now marooned on the old HDD. My question is this: If I put the old hard drive into one of those enclosure kits, will there be any compatability issues seeing as how my new HP is running on Vista and my old hd was on XP? Can I even keep all my stuff on there or will I have to erase it in order for it to work? Also, would it be easier or even possible to just install it internally with out running into the said problems above? Thanks in advance.
 
Both way will work. Internally you would have to make sure it is slaved depending on where you connect. On the external USB it will be set to master but as long as it is NTFS, it should see the drive just fine.

Personally, I'd go with the enclosure unless that drive has such a problem that you have to use a program to recover the files.
 
Basically, the only things I want to recover are some random pics (not pr0n!), favorite/bookmark links, iTunes music library settings (album art + some songs that didn't get backup last time) etc... Thanks for the reply Mischief. ;)
 
No worries. USB enclosure is the way to go. :)
 
As long as the drive isn't defective or corrupted you'll be fine with installing it into an enclosure and plugging it in.
Just make sure that your jumper pin is set correct (usually master or cable select for an external enclosure).
And as Mischief said, you install it internally and set it to be a slave and both XP and Vista should read it as a new volume.

I recommend getting everything that you want off of the old drive and formatting it to get rid of the now useless XP install to free up space. Then you can put your files back on it if you like.
 
Paco said:
I recommend getting everything that you want off of the old drive and formatting it to get rid of the now useless XP install to free up space. Then you can put your files back on it if you like.
Click to expand...

Yup, that's what I plan on doing. Soon I'll have a new 80 Gig portable hd to complement my new 360 Gig HDD.
 
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