Hi,

I have XP professional (recently found out it's not legal and will be paying the 92 pounds for a legal Product Key soon -- anyhow that's another story) and a 40 Gb hard drive computer.

I've been in the States for several years and I extracted and brought the hard drive from that computer over to the UK. This hard drive is about 6 years old and I do not trust installing into my computer here in the UK (mind you I haven't the faintest idea how to do that anyway).

So, is it possible to go to a computer shop and get them to copy the hard drive contents onto a CD and then I can use whatever program files I select from the CD.

By the way the hard drive also includes my AOL in the States ISP downloaded software. I've been using remote access to it from Germany and the UK for several months now. If the above (third paragraph) is possible will I be able to access my AOL direct?

Look forward to reply. Thanks,

Ray

Installing a hard drive is quite simple. Here are a few guides:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...g+a+hard+drive

If you install your drive as a slave you would be able to extract the data. However programs will not run as they depend on being installed into the registry of the Operating System that you boot into.

There are a few exceptions with very basic programs that might pass over but very few.

Again even if you have the data extracted by a shop you will get data but not functioning programs.

Programs would need to be reinstalled from scratch.

Originally Posted by jephree

Installing a hard drive is quite simple. Here are a few guides:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...g+a+hard+drive

If you install your drive as a slave you would be able to extract the data. However programs will not run as they depend on being installed into the registry of the Operating System that you boot into.

There are a few exceptions with very basic programs that might pass over but very few.

Again even if you have the data extracted by a shop you will get data but not functioning programs.

Programs would need to be reinstalled from scratch.

Hi Jephree,

Yikes! So I get from above that there's not to much hope of getting many of the programs to work.

Thanks for info.

Ray