help with spare hard drive

Hi, I hope someone can help.I had a system which the processor broke and the hard drive i had in ithe windows intallation was corrupt it would only run if i put the systems disk in even though it didn`t seem to read the disk. Any way i bought a new system and bought a hard disk casing ffor my old hard drive as need to get in fo off it, but it wouldn`t pick up and says on the paper work that you have to formatt it,which is no good as i would like to get my stuff off the hard disk first.Have got two sata disk drives on my new computer and my old one is IDE i don`t really want to open my case.Thought about file transfer as got XP but need a computer to do that and mines old ones not working. would be glad of any help as really don`t want to lose my stuff on my old hard drive thanks

 

Well theres a few you can backup!
OPEN your case and plug in your HDD and then backup or
Take it to a PC repair shop and they will bck it up for about 50 bucks!
Or maybe u have a friend that is willing to do it for you!

 

If the computer that your old hard-drive is in doesn't work then your out of luck. You need as OS running on the old computer in order to connect the two machines. Your only possibilities are to take the hard-drive out of the old machine and put it into the new one (which you seem to be trying to avoid) or you could use a Live Linux CD to boot the old computer from the CD-ROM drive but you'd be trying to do some fairly advanced stuff (setting up a Samba server to share the hard-drive) so the first option is easier.

 

If i can get a system up and running would the best thing be a the file transfer wizard in xp?

 

so it looks like the only way is to open up my box and put the drive in .Will it show up as a hard drive even though there is a operating system on it?

 

If both machines are running XP then it should be easy. If the old machine is running Win 98 then good luck - it might work, it might not.

 

Assuming you plug it in correctly and have the jumpers set correctly it should appear as drive D:. Then just copy the files to the C: drive and your done.

 

As the penguin said, after you do that and start windows it'll detect the drive and then restart and start copying your files!
It's that simple!

 

thank you both for your help i will try and put it inside new box and see what happens if i get any problems i know where to come.