nedjinski

I have a hard drive (IDE) from an old system that I would like to get some files from. I installed it on my new system - it shows up in the BIOS and XP sees it in Disk Manager but I cannot access the drive. XP won't let me assign a new drive letter to the drive. XP won't let me Import the drive. I tried Diskpart but it says that the drive is not part of a "group" so it won't proceed and import the drive. What to do? The only options available in XP are to convert the drive to a Dynamic Disk. If I do this will I lose any data? Any thoughts?

This is no doubt a subject that has been dealt with before but I didn't find an exact reference to my situation so here's my dilemma. I am about to do a major upgrade to an existing computer - new hard drive, CPU / motherboard, video card, etc. The old machine is a P3 with ATA IDE hard drive. The new machine will be an AMD 64x2 with a SATA hard drive. What I want to accomplish is: move the entire contents of the old IDE :C drive, XP and all, to the new SATA drive making the new SATA drive the new :C drive in the new machine. The dilemma is - How do I clone the old IDE drive to the new SATA? Do I build the new machine, keep the IDE drive as the :C drive, do a rebuild install of XP, get the new machine up and running, and then clone the IDE to the SATA in the new machine, and then remove the IDE drive and hope that the new machine will recognize the SATA as the :C drive? There must be a way to do this without too much pain (hah!). Any and all help greatly appreciated!