Swapping Hard Drives?

B

Blackwaterh

New Member
Hi, i have two computers. One is really freakin old (Video card, Motherboard, and low RAM wise,it has all my files and stuff on it,but it runs. The other computer has more ram, better pc model and video card, but has a huge virus and has somebody elses files on it. So my question is, can you swap hard drives so i can no virus' and a better pc? Thanks!
 
I would hook up both harddrives to the computer you are going to use and then you can access the files you want from the other drive then transfer them to the harddrive you want to keep.
 
It depends on what type of drives they are SATA(smaller connecting wire usually red) or IDE(larger wire usaully grey). They are more than likely IDE. As long as they are the same it should not be a problem to swap hard drives, but like jason said you could keep both. You would need to swap them first to ensure the hard drive you want to use as your main is booted up first(primary). Then install the other one as a second, copy any files if necessary, and format the drive. If it is IDE it might be marked as 1 HDD and 2 HDD.
 
swapping harddrive
OK, so you've got a new hard drive. It's big, it's shiny, and you can't wait to set it up as your new system drive. You don't want to just plug it in as a secondary drive, as D to your current drive's C; you'd rather not keep booting your computer from your dodgy old drive. The old drive will become D, used for data or whatever. Or it'll just be completely surplus to requirements.

This is a basic piece of PC service work, it's easy enough to do, but it's sufficiently non-obvious - and the down side of maybe trashing a pair of hard drives and all of your no doubt un-backed-up data is frightening enough - that lots of people don't want to try it.

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Arrrrg. I took out both c drives, and swapped them. One had to be fitted for a different cable than the other that went into the c drive from the PC. I booted up the computer and then got an error message:
Drive 0 Not found: Serial ATA, SATA-0
Drive 1 Not found: Serial ATA, SATA-2
Drive 3 Not found: Parallel ATA, PATA-1 (PRI IDE Slave)
Strike F1 key to continue, f2 to run the setup utility
I strike f1 then
No boot device availible. Help??
 
I would clean all the malicious software (viruses) out of the new system before trying to get any of your information on to the new computer. Download "Spybot Search and Destroy" and "Malwarebytes".

Getting a new hard drive involved before you clean all the garbage out may cause you to lose important data.
 
Holy wow, talk about the blind leading the blind.


When you take a hard drive out of one computer and try to boot from it in another computer, unless the hardware specs are very similar, odds are it will not work. You will need to install a fresh copy of windows on the hard drive. Of course, this would completely take care of your virus problem and negate your reason for swapping in the first place.

It sounds like the easiest solution in this case is to simply reformat and reinstall windows over the hard drive that has someone else's files on it anyway.

However if you're still interested in swapping hard drives, you're going to need to provide a bit more information as to what you have done so we can trouble shoot it. When you say one had to be fitted from a different cable, explain what you mean, which computer it was, and exactly what you did.
 
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