Hard drive Help (please)

[tunebud]

I have a second HD on my PC running as a slave it has alot of music files on it.. I have to remove it from the current PC I will add it to another PC or make it an external drive. it is currently on an XP system. My question being of a time thing will I lose all the music on the drive? or will/should it boot up on the next system?

[Grinch]

You shouldn't lose any data at all as long as you don't drop it.

[Red XIII]

From my knowledge, you'd need the exact same parts in the other...

[Freezmizer]

As Grinch said, no data should be lost, although you may need to do an add harware wizard after its installed so that the OS will recognize it.

[nesman]

If it's not too late for a suggestion, I'd suggest using Partition Magic (think mom has a copy shared out on WinMX, my copy is on a 200GB drive sitting in a drawer because I don't have a mobo that will read over 32GB)

Split the drive into two partitions, 1-10GB for programs and OS, the rest for data. Then, if you have to reinstall or anything, you don't have to wipe your storage.

[tunebud]

Thanks for the all the help everyone
Guess I should have said before this certain HD already has a partition installed. The HD is just for storage it has no OS on it. I just had the hope of removing it from inside the PC and make it portable so I could use it on a different PC both is running XP Home. I have already bought a cheep enclosure with the thoughts of maybe buying yet another internal HD, or two, and swapping them in and out of the external enclosure as needed.

You shouldn't lose any data at all as long as you don't drop it.

I hope I don't drop it...

[nesman]

I don't know how I missed that it was a slave drive. You should have no problem moving it between 2 xp machines. You could even move a 98 drive to an xp machine with no problem. Just make sure you have the jumpers set properly. Most likely, you do if it was running as slave already.

Edit: "teh" is not a word. "teh" is a reason for a beating.

[Red XIII]

Don't you need to set it to master if you're going to put it in another computer and make it the base HD? or is he just switching slaves around?

[nesman]

No OS, just slave, I think

[Layzie Bone]

You can move it to anything, as long at it's the same interface like ATA100 or whatever, if the drive isn't detected the BIOS might be too old, if the drive is larger than 32 GB there's a jumper that you can set to limit the size, but, you may want to back up your data in that case. Only other problem you may have is if you move it to a computer with an older OS like 98 you will have to convert the file system to FAT32, once again back up your files.