Hard drive transfer questions

[nicknorah]

Hi,

 I am having some things i'm not sure about in the data transfer between hard drives. More precisely, i have a pc with a ssd with windows 8.1 on it (C: partiton), and a hard drive disk with 1 TB storage capacity (D: partition), and i want to transfer some data from my hard drive disk to another hard drive disk, wich my mom is using, and that it has a total of 1 TB, devided in two partitions: one with the windows xp on it (C: partition), and the other one with different files (D: partition). The amount of data i wanna transfer is about 300 GB, and my mom's hdd has more than this space free.

 So, here are the questions:

1) If i am connecting my mom's hdd in my pc, a have to format the disk before using it? (case in that all the files from it will be erased, and this would be catastrophic) or it will be detected and installed automatically by my motherboard without any data loss on the disk?

2) Judging that her hdd has windows on it, would it be a problem in normally booting my computer from my ssd? (would be any enterference between the two windows? one from my ssd and one from my mom's hdd) In that case i wouldnt be able to acces my drives to begin the transfer?

3) It is possible to lose data in the course of transfering?

4) If any of these questions arent a thing to be afraid of, there are any more that i should be aware?

 (Please ask me some more information if it is needed to clarify the problem i am experiencing!) And sorry for text mistakes, if there are any.

Thanks a lot!

[Altecice]

1) No

2) You may have to override your default boot priority to tell it to boot from SSD

3) No

4) nope thats about it just drag and drop from one location to the other and wait

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hey there @nicknorah and welcome to LinusTechTips!

 

Yes, you can connect your hard disk without having to format it - it should be recognized by the system and after that you should be able to move the files you want. As an advice, check if the motherboard has the necessary interface you need - IDE ports for IDE drives, or SATA ports for SATA drives.

 

Having another HDD plugged in the PC won't be a problem for booting as long as the boot order in BIOS, so once you plug the drive check your boot priorities in BIOS and make sure that the PC will start from the right unit.

 

You shouldn't lose any data during the transfer, and you should be fine transferring the files to the new location.

 

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.

 

Cheers!

[nicknorah]

Thanks a lot to you guys, this really helped me!