Easiest way to copy contents of one (old) hard drive to another?

Question

I have my uncle's old hard drive which contains lots of original writings and some family history notes. I would like to copy everything to the drive my mother currently uses (note* - she does not have a CD or anything) and then wipe out everything personal leaving the O/S to be able keep the drive as a back-up or donate the it somewhere.

I thought that maybe easiest would be to bring the hard drive home (my house) and just download to CDs. But this involves hauling the drive across the border and maybe there are simpler possibilities I'm not aware of.

Help please!

Answer 1

OK I just had to do the same thing and here's what I did. I took the case off my computer and disconnected one of the cd drives. I plugged the old hard drive, the one I wanted to get information from, into the plugs for the cd cd drive (even if Mom doesn't have a cd drive there are probably the connections for it). Then I booted the computer up and used Explore to drag and drop the folders I wanted to copy fron the old drive onto the current one. It only took a short time and I had all my files on my hard drive in my computer.

Answer 2

Copying to CDs takes a while and they don't hold as much as other options. At any large electronics store, you can get what's called a 'jump drive.' This hardware is inserted into a USB port on the computer and can hold a lot of information. It is just a matter of sending the info to the jump drive. Let's say the old stuff is on the computer's c: drive. Insert the jump drive into the old computer and simply select what you want and use the 'send to' option. Send the old info to the drive where the jump drive is located. It's very easy and the jump drive can hold tons of stuff. For example, I have a 512M jump drive- Older computers sometimes didn't even have that much memory on them, so you can take everything, or nearly everything, from the old computer and put it in the jump drive. Hope that helped. FYI- jump drives vary in size and price. My 512 was like $40 or $50. It would be good to know how much memory the old stuff will need. You can get a HUGE drive for $100. Also, small ones are $20 or so.

Answer 3

You can send information to yourself using yousendit.com The files can be as big as 1 GB, just zip them up using winzip and then upload. If the ionternet is not an option, maybe get an external hard drive or if you have an ipod, that could work too. Just dump all the files on the device. Then plug it inot the computer that you need and get the contents off it.

If you are considering using the external hard drive, make sure that your fathers computer has a USB connection. The only other option is to grab the hard drive from the old computer and then install it on the computer (which can get sorta messy).

Answer 4

what are you talking about hauling the drive? it fits in your hand.. just take it out of his computer. you can either bring it home to your computer and hook it up as a slave, or pop it in an external enclosure and plug it to your computer via usb. or if his computer is still working just bring a flash drive to your uncles house, plug it in to the usb port, and drop the content you need on it.

Answer 5

Why can't you just put the hdd in your mother's computer, connected as a slave or master on 2nd IDE?

If you could do that you could use Norton Ghost to clone the partition to another drive.

Answer 6

if you have desktop computer it's very easy if you have 2 hard drives
remove one of them that the windowns is not in it be sure to first turn your computer off the replace the hards and set the jumpers ...your hard master and your uncle's hard slave the're wrote on the hard dives.......if the ports are are not same try port changer socket
now you can see his drives in your windows explorer
i hope that it be helpful

Answer 7

use norton ghost copy the drive info .

Answer 8

get a portable harddisk