Transferring an NT hard drive as a slave to XP system 1

[danbonsai]

Hi, hope you guys will be able to help me out with this.
I have an old computer that operates on windows NT and I want to transfer 700mb or so of files onto a new computer that uses windows XP. The old computer doesn't have a burner, so I can't do that, and I tried to install an iomega zip drive the other day to transfer the files but the zip drive is so old (1995) that it only has installation files for dos/win 3.1 and win 95.

To counteract this problem, and as a last ditch effort, I want to take out the harddrive from the old computer and put it into the new computer as a slave drive to the master. Will I be able to do this? I am hoping that it will be recognised and that I can copy the files over without having any conflicts between the XP-formatted drive and the NT-formatted drive (as a slave).
If anyone could give me an answer on this, or some other tips, that'd be great.

Cheers,
Dan

 

[Grymz]

You should be ok, the only thing you will have to do is import foreign disk from disk management in windows xp,

after you boot into xp, right click on my computer-->manage-->disk management, you will see your primary drive then you will see unknown hard drive, right click on the name and then click import disk, it will take a sec then it will be assigned a drive letter and all data will be accessable, as long as you are running NTFS on the xp hard drive,

 

[danbonsai]

Thanks for that - I will do it and tell you how I go. Only thing that I didn't follow you on was the "as long as you are running NTFS on the XP HD" - it may be a stupid question, but what is NTFS?

 

[Grymz]

well if you have to ask then you are probably running fat32, NTFS is the NT file system, if you look in disk management it will say C:\"NAME" then file system type, NTFS, FAT32, FAT.....(you can also go to my computer and right click on a drive, go to properties, it will tell you what your drive file system is)....most likely everything is in fat32 unless the computer came prebuilt and it was setup in NTFS, the problem can arise is that if your windows xp install is fat32 and your windows nt is ntfs you will not be able to read any of the data off of the nt hard drive from the windows xp drive unless you convert the xp drive to ntfs,

The best thing to do is find out what file system your hard drives are running and let us know, that way we can give you a more definitive answer on how to proceed.

 

[wolluf]

Grymz - sorry but you are giving the wrong information. It doesn't matter what filestore XP is installed on, it can read any normal ntfs, fat32 or fat16 partition on the local machine. So XP should have no problem reading the drive from the NT4 machine whatever the filestore and whatever filestore its installed on (I say should - because occasionally people have problems when they load drives as slaves in this way).

danbonsai - If the NT4 drive is ntfs filestore, you may need to 'take ownership' of it under XP (security tab) to make it accessible.

 

[Grymz]

Hmm, yea i was thinking of windows 9x, sorry about that,

wolluf is correct, you will not have to do any converting, you will still have to import the disk though.......

thanks wolluf for the correction.....