Can you use a hard drive in another system without reformat??

[briddle]

A friend of mine had a one ghz dell. He was running w2k. He had a great number of programs that his work installed on it. The system died and he moved on to another job and all he has left is the hard drive. I tried the hard drive in three different systems, all amd, but no good results. I do not have any pentium III boards to test on, but all the amd boards come up with a blue screen. He asked me to try and find a board/chip combo around one ghz to get it to work. I do not know all that is installed, but I know he really wants to keep the programs.

Any suggestions on a board/chip to buy??

 

[Trashman]

Was Win2K installed from DELL or did he install 2K on his own? Does he have his Win2k disk?

 

[briddle]

It was from dell, but I have a win 2k disk

 

[hundesau]

just connect it to ur IDE port, enter the bios and set the option to boot from ur own hd and not from his. Dont think u want to boot from this hd? Boot from ur own hd and and u should be able to access to his hd and save his data. if that wont work, try to play around with the jumper of his hd and set the hd as slave and ur own as master, then the bios setting, boot from ur own disk and thats it. i hope.

 

[imported_Ainaas]

The Blue Screen is probably an inaccessible boot device error. There's really only two ways to fix this problem, and without a comparable Dell to what he had, you're stuck with the second option: do a windows repair (i'm pretty sure 2000 has that). If you HAD a comparable Dell, even for a minute, you could boot into his copy of 2000 and change the IDE controller driver from a Dell-specific driver to a Generic Dual-Channel IDE driver. The Blue Screen results from Windows being installed on a system with one kind of IDE controller on the motherboard, and then being moved to another computer without the same IDE controller, so Windows isn't using the right interface to get to the drives and can't boot. The generic driver is, well, generic, so the interface is uinversal (or universal enough). If you CAN change it, it works like magic and I just used that to transfer an XP installation from one computer to another.

That said, since the programs were installed by your friend's OLD workplace, it could very well not even be legal to use them anymore. Then again, it could be okay!

 

[hundesau]

why do a windows repair? he doesnt need the old hdd`s windows as long as he has his own windows. then he can enter the old hdd and copy all the stuff. iam a lil confused whats the big problem here?

 

[imported_Ainaas]

Oh, sorry, I was working on the sort-of assumption he wanted to use this drive in a new computer. If all he wants are the programs and data, then your suggestions are just fine. Sorry about that!

 

[Trashman]

hundesau, i suggest you re-read his post....he wants to use exsisting hard drive in new computer. save os and loaded programs he has on that drive, since he can't re-load his work programs.

Ainaas thats what i was thinkin, doing a repair.

 

[hundesau]

hmm, sry, if trashman is right, then i understand the problem, finally.... But if the windows repair wont work he can try to save the data the way i tried to descirbe it. cuz sometimes even a repair wont help. gl

 

[briddle]

Thanks for the advice, I do need to use his drive as the main one. I have a mobo that I dug off the back of the self with a 500 cely, but the mobo supports up to one ghz. It is the only mobo that is intel based that I have. If it does not work, maybe I could put something in the fs section to get one simular.

Any ideas on what mobos would be most compatible with dell if the cely or repair does not work??

Thanks for the assistance.

 

[KF]

>Any ideas on what mobos would be most compatible with dell if the cely or repair does not work??
You already guessed that the CPU would likely be a PII/III or a Celeron of the same type. People say Dell sells only Intel CPUs.

What you would need is a mobo with the same chipset which would then use the same drivers. Any CPU that works with a given chipset will do. I suppose Dell only sells Intel chipsets too. Then the chiipset would likely be the BX, 810 or 815 if I recall. I'd guess 810/815. As far as I know there are no consumer type new mobos being sold wiith those chipsets any more, at least a resonable price and for single CPUs.

But I think it comes close to a certainty that a reinstall (a repair install) over the old install using a W2K disk will fix everything. People do it all the time to fix killer problems. If you don't like taking a risk, you could do a 100% copy to another HD, and try it on that.

You might want to check if the HD is readable at all by setting it up as secondary HD on another system. If the HD is bad or if it was encrypted, then you've got another challenge. I never tried reinstalling on an encrypted/protected HD. But I think you will be alright if you know the password.

If your friend knows the Dell model number, you can probably find anything you'd like to know on the Dell site.