My PC seems to have gone kaput recently. Can i plug the old hard drive onto another desktop?

Question

or am i better off buying a casing for it and plugging it via a usb cable?

Answer 1

Yes, you can, provided that:

1. You may need to change the jumper on the drive. If it was alone on it's cable, or if it is a SATA drive (thin, narrow cable), it was a Master drive. If it was with another drive, it may be either Master or Slave. You will have to check. There must be a Master on the cable; you cannot have two slaves, nor two Masters.

2. If you want to boot from the drive, the BIOS may need to be changed to select the "boot priority".

3. If you do boot it, be prepared for problems. XP may reject the new installation, and ask to be revalidated.

Answer 2

Depending on what kind of drive and how old your "old" system, I will venture forth with some presumptions on your vague question. Presuming that "old" drive still functions, you may add it as as a slave to another desktop. Presumably, if you get a relatively new system that runs an "NTFS" formatted drive such as Windows XP then you may retrieve all the old data from your old drive. Once you've rescued your data, then you may keep it on as a slave drive to your system with a number of caveats. Since your old system may have had an "old" drive, as a slave, your new system would probably be slowed down by the "old & slow" drive since most new systems support SATA [serial ATA]. I assume that the drive works reliably sufficient for you to consider slipping it into an external Hard Drive Case with USB connection. Even an "old" drive delivers data much faster than the the current limits of USB so that would bottleneck data transfer. You could merely use the "old" drive using USB xfer solely as archival storage. Slaving it as a secondary drive would be less of a bottleneck to system, but still a bottleneck and less convenient than a USB connected case. My vote goes for the external USB case: while slow, it still has convenience on its side.

Answer 3

That all depends on what you want to do.

if you want a moble hard drive, get an enclosure and use usb.
if you dont want it protable. just plug it into the ide controller of a working computer

either way test it on a comptuer so you dont buy a enclosure for a drive that doesent work.