I was trying to move files from a Windows 98 SE machine (my wifes) onto a widows XP machine (mine) by taking out the drive from the old machine and putting it as a slave drive in the XP machine. I did this succesfully previously when moving files from my Windows 95 machine to my then new XP machine.

Xp didn't recognise the drive in 'my computer' but it did appear in the 'disk management section - but not as a drive letter. I could see it was FAT 32 and details of the free space etc. but couldn't do much else. and caution prevailed as I didn't want to risk losing the data.

So the questions are - Is there a way of doing this? Why didn't it work?

Grateful for any ideas. Be gentle with me I'm no tecky. Thanks

Are you sure the jumper is set correctly to slave?

Also you could try the other channel e.g. temporarily put it as Secondary Master (with Master jumper) using the connector currently at your DVD/CD drive.

Hi. Thanks for the reply. I was a bit stressed when I made the post.

What I was actually doing was what you suggest in the second idea. I have two cd drives and I was temporarily disconnecting one to use with the old drive. They are the only devices with the eide cable. I set the jumpers to slave (I will check the settings though and try leaving it as 'Master'). I am a bit confused though.

Can I do harm by getting jumper settings wrong, or will it just not work?

david

Just to say this is getting more critical because the data drive is starting to show disk errors and crashing regularly.

from what i know no harm will befall your HDD if the jumpers are set wrongly. however it might not be detected if u set incorrectly.

another thing u might want to try is to plug your HDD in thru the USB port. you'll need those connector thingy though. or just get an external casing for it.

I solved this by going about it a different way.

I attached a drive that I knew worked as a slave in my XP machine, fitted it as a slave in the old machine, successfully transferred the files to the 'proven slave' and then put it in my XP machine and transferred again.

I will however look for 'connector thingy's' to connect eide to usb as I would like an external backup store.