Comparability?

[Jack Dvorak]

We have an old Dell dimension 2400 business with Pentium 4 DDR 333mhz 256kb 120GB HDD.it has all of our old photos on it. I am wondering if we can remove the hard drive and put it into our new PC. Will it think that the OS is the one installed on the old one? Will it work fine and I can just view all of the files? 

[DXMember]

it's probably an IDE hard drive, you'll have to clone it to a modern SATA drive

[Jack Dvorak]

9 minutes ago, DXMember said:

it's probably an IDE hard drive, you'll have to clone it to a modern SATA drive

And how do I do that?

 

[pwn_intended]

First check whether it is SATA or IDE, likely IDE as previous commenter said. All you will need is an adapter cable that does from IDE (or SATA) to usb, and you can plug it in to a computer and use it as an external drive.

[DXMember]

1 minute ago, Jack Dvorak said:

And how do I do that?

 

1) Buy a new hard drive or SSD

2) Buy a SATA to USB adapter

3) Connect the new drive using the adapter to the old computer

4) Copy all your data either manually or using a disk cloning software

5) Remove the new drive

6) Connect the new drive without adapters to the new computer

7) ???

8) Profit!

[pwn_intended]

12 minutes ago, Jack Dvorak said:

And how do I do that?

 

If the computer is still running, the easiest was is to get an external drive and copy all the pictures to it. Otherwise it will involve opening up computers. Also, given the age of that drive, I wouldn't want to use it in a newer machine since it will be slow and likely past the time of wanting that drive to store treasured data.

[dalekphalm]

55 minutes ago, pwn_intended said:

First check whether it is SATA or IDE, likely IDE as previous commenter said. All you will need is an adapter cable that does from IDE (or SATA) to usb, and you can plug it in to a computer and use it as an external drive.

Agreed.

 

@Jack Dvorak you do not need to buy a HDD and clone the old one onto the new one. That's a waste of time and money.

 

You have several options. If you want to connect the old HDD directly to the new PC, assuming the drive is IDE (the long 40-pin connector), you'll need the aforementioned IDE to USB adapter. These can be bought at most major computer retailers (NewEgg, NCIX, MicroCenter, CanadaComputers, Amazon, etc).

 

Otherwise, if the old PC still turns on, you could do something as simple as plug a USB drive into the computer, depending on the OS (if XP, should work, if 95/98/ME... maybe not).