Old hard drive in different computer?

rnvilla

New Member
Replaced my old HD. The old HD has adware, malware, spyware, dirty underware :D, something undesirable, anyway. It still works so I tried to stick it in another old computer just to check some things. It seemed fine until it said I needed to register it or something on line. I hooked the cable from my modem thinking I could do that. It still failed. It was nice enough to pop up a little screen and tell me it couldn't, though.

Is this:
A) Impossible
2) Difficult or
Maybe) I'm just stupid and can't figure it out.

It would be nice if I could just use it to look up some info on the old HD. It would be super nice if I could have it hooked up to that old computer while I tried to remove the nasties from it. I wouldn't count on that last one too much. I ain't that smart- even with good help. Thanks in advance for any helpful info. Tim.
 
Replaced my old HD. The old HD has adware, malware, spyware, dirty underware :D, something undesirable, anyway. It still works so I tried to stick it in another old computer just to check some things. It seemed fine until it said I needed to register it or something on line. I hooked the cable from my modem thinking I could do that. It still failed. It was nice enough to pop up a little screen and tell me it couldn't, though.

Is this:
A) Impossible
2) Difficult or
Maybe) I'm just stupid and can't figure it out.

It would be nice if I could just use it to look up some info on the old HD. It would be super nice if I could have it hooked up to that old computer while I tried to remove the nasties from it. I wouldn't count on that last one too much. I ain't that smart- even with good help. Thanks in advance for any helpful info. Tim.

What? You can clean the whole drive by doing a re-format. That would make it usable again, but you'd lose all your data.
 
If you need to get the info off plug it into another pc just watch out for the spyware and junk.
Make sure the other pc has windows and is running that extra drive as a slave if its not sata.
 
The old HD is IDE, not SATA. The other old computer doesn't have a HD anymore. That's why I figured I could hook up the HD I removed from my good computer. I just wanted to read some info that is in some folders on the old one. I intend to eventually re-format and re-use the HD as a slave in my good computer, but for now, I just want to look at the info. Tim
 
You can't move the hard drive to a different system and still boot off of it. If on the off chance it does boot into windows it will ask you to reactivate because the hardware profile has changed a lot. You should be able to copy data off and otherwise do stuff without reactivating.
 
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