Will this work??

[Recordlord]

I built a machine for a business today. Win XP (home ed) Asus A7N8X (non-dx) Xp 2400 80G WD blah blah blah. Here comes the Q.

He wants me to place his old hard drive which is coming out of a Compaq and has Windows ME loaded on it. Now I know I cannot do a dual boot with this drive because of all the Compaq **** on it. So do i do this--> Use the new blank drive as the master - slave the old HDD - Ghost everything but the WIN/ME OS and I am good to go or is this another nightmare I am about to experience??

[rangeral]

You could just slave it and copy important data from it if thats what he needs then burn the data and relegate the slave to data storage if the drive is healthy.

What size is the drive? Meaning is it worth the trouble to keep using it.

[Recordlord]

Yeah its a good drive Maxtor 60Gigs he just wanted faster performance.

[cbh]

You have no choice! Customers are always right!

[Recordlord]

So it doesnt matter that the old drive is Windows ME and the new drive is Win XP? I can still access the ME files with the XP OS running.

[Someone Stupid]

Yeah, if the drive is connected, then XP can read it.

[cbh]

If you mean Office files, you definitely can access them with Office XP. On the other hand, ME program files...

This is quite weird, though! You have to give it a try! Do you have a deadline to hand in your product?

[stix_kua]

Originally posted by cbh
If you mean Office files, you definitely can access them with Office XP. On the other hand, ME program files...

This is quite weird, though! You have to give it a try! Do you have a deadline to hand in your product?

Ummm, a newer OS does not mean one cannot access a file on an older OS. You may not be able to run some program off of the old drive (registry reasons) but you can def. access them.

[Recordlord]

I knew i came to the right place to ask. Thank you all for your responses. Deadline is tomorrow since I already got his check in the bank. I will let you know how things turn out.

[BigBlue66]

Yeah but, then there is the issue of FAT32 vs. NTFS. Seems to me that if the drive that XP is on is formatted in NTFS, it either won't be able to see the files on the FAT32 drive, or access them or both.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

[Recordlord]

Ok I am on the computer that I recently built. Here is the problem now. I can see the files but cannot open them because they are looking for them in the wrong place. This drive is now E: while they were C: on the last computer. What do I do now??

[Spardan]

To get them off the drive, I guess you could use the Disk MAnagement on XP to change the letters of the 2 HDDs... dunno if that'd werk or not... it's the sort of thing I'd try, which means it may not have been a great idea even mentioning it...hee hee...

but if you were to reneme the drives while you did the copying, and then change em back... sounds vaguely hopeful, n'est pas?

[Spardan]

Sorry, a P.S... I think that NTFS and FAT32 should work ok... I was recently screwing around with a very old distro of Red Hat (5.2!!!) and set up some FAT partitions on the same HDD as the XP NTFS party... was able to move files from one party to the other no bother... ...but XP disnae like a penguin on the same HDD!!!

[Timmac4]

I have 2 hard drives on my Xp machine one is NTFS and the other fat32 (has some old files I don't want to convert) It reads and writes just fine. When you say that it looks in the wrong place for the files do you mean when you try to open them from within their native program? When you open the E: drive and click on the file it should work just fine. If the programs for the files are on the E: drive it might remember where the files were last located. You can always copy them to c: drive.

[Gokudan]

Many times i haven't been able to read or run files from ME on XP and viceversa, specially floppy disks, try doing a network conf. diskette with the XP wizard and make Me to read it and viceversa...