A question for the savy

Ok, as I've mentioned before (Oh no thread) I think I fried my monitor on my other computer. Well, unfortunatly I dont have a spare monitor on hand. I was wondering if I could physicaly remove the HDD and put it in my other computer as a slave. My other computer is running Win ME and the computer which the monitor br0ke is running Win XP home. Would it be possible/safe to take the HDD and put it as slave on my other computer?

depending on how your system is setup, you can take your primary HD out of the borked system and put it into the other system easy enuff..

you will need to establish if your system is cable select or not, but othewise it should be easy..

just set the primary to master, and the borked HD to slave.. but if its cable select, i think( unsure really ) but you will need the primary left at cable select, and then the second one to either slave, or cable select also.. try slave first.

either way, as long as you note the jumpers for the future, you will be fine when you swap it back.

you will need to establish if your system is cable select or not, but othewise it should be easy..

In english?

just set the primary to master, and the borked HD to slave.. but if its cable select, i think( unsure really ) but you will need the primary left at cable select, and then the second one to either slave, or cable select also.. try slave first.

whats this cable select stuff?

On the back of your hard drives should be little jumper pins, and hopefully a little description of which pins you need to set to get it onto which mode. Normally there are 3 modes - master, slave, and cable select. You set the jumper to whichever you mean for the HDD to be. So if you want one as a slave, set it to the slave jumper setting.

Cable select makes it nice and simple by letting the computer determine which should be master and which slave. It chooses based on which order the HDDs are plugged into the IDE cable.

Ah I see. Well I want the br0ked one slave that way my comp dosent boot up using Win XP.

Also, I ran over to my friends house, (me and him collect old computer parts and store them at his house) and I brought back a 13inch monitor. It came with my 486sx back in the day (10 years or so) but I hooked it up to my computer. And guess what. The screen was split in 3. Apparently it dosent like a refresh rate of over 60 :sad: But at least for now I can see something. I'm still going to swith the HDD though, cause using this new monitor dosent display everything the greatest.

if your computer is not cable select do not switch it to it, because it will get lost.. older PC's and some newer ones do not even know what it is..

look at your HD, the pins should say "CS.MA.SL"

if it is not set to any, it is prolly not CS, so it will mean to set it to MA for the primary, and SL for the secondary.

CA systems are usually syatems setup with a rescue cd of some sort, to get them to boot in case of a major crash from the cd rescue source.

just look on the back, let me know how yout primary is currently setup..

if the jumpers are not up/down they are set in an un0used mode, that will also tell you that you need to set it to MA and SL

hehe, the monitor is soo funny. Dosent display worth crap and the screen is so damned dark on full brightness and contrast settings.

I'm going to pop open my case in a lil bit and see.

the only problem i can foresee is,

winXP and ME store files differently (i think) and if the main system has an older version of windows, then it might not be able to read the info stored on the slave HD..

good luck

well, I'll give it a try later in the day. I'll let ya know how it goes./

When my own computer started dying on me randomly, I popped the HDD of it into my family computer as a slave, and ran into no problems despite my HDD running XP and the family one running ME. I reckon it should be fine, but I'm no tech guru. Good luck with it anyways.

Orph's right- if you converted your drive to NTFS, you won't be able to access it with WinME.

damn. I did convert the drive. caca, stupid win XP

Wild Card said:
damn. I did convert the drive. caca, stupid win XP

actually, use the XP drive as the primary, and the PC's normal drive as the slave.. i am almost sure a sysop can read older formats, its just not able to read newer ones..

when you first boot up, the old pc will re-do its drivers..

the only catch is, XP will know, and tell microsoft :sad:

contact me PM and i can tell you a story about windows 2000 pro.

but wouldnt that mean the computer would load up WIN XP?

Orpheus said:

Wild Card said:
damn. I did convert the drive. caca, stupid win XP

actually, use the XP drive as the primary, and the PC's normal drive as the slave.. i am almost sure a sysop can read older formats, its just not able to read newer ones..

when you first boot up, the old pc will re-do its drivers..

the only catch is, XP will know, and tell microsoft :sad:

contact me PM and i can tell you a story about windows 2000 pro.