Can you take a hard drive from one computer and put it in another?

Yeah, that’ll work. You’ll need a SATA data cable, and you’ll need to locate an available SATA power cable in the working computer. Plug the drive in, boot the computer, et voila, your drive should be there. If not, open Disk Manager, locate the new disk, and partition and format it for use.

What does it mean to slave a hard drive?

A slave setting found on a hard drive or CD drive, and adjusted using jumpers, as shown below. The slave setting sets a drive as secondary and allows for two devices to be attached to a single IDE/ATAPI connection. Because “slave” is offensive, it’s better to refer to this drive as “secondary” or “device1.”

How do you reformat a hard drive?

To reformat a drive on Windows:

Plug in the drive and open Windows Explorer.
Right-click the drive and choose Format from the drop-down menu.
Select the file system you want, give your drive a name under Volume label, and make sure the Quick Format box is checked.
Click Start, and the computer will reformat your drive.

Can I put 2 hard drives in my computer?

You can install additional hard disks on a desktop computer. This setup requires that you set up each drive as a separate storage device or connect them with a RAID configuration, a special method for using multiple hard drives. Hard drives in a RAID setup require a motherboard that supports RAID.

What happens if I put my hard drive in another computer?

If you actually try moving a Windows drive to another computer and booting from it–or restoring a Windows system image backup on different hardware–it usually won’t boot properly. You may see an error about problems with the “hardware abstraction layer” or “hal. dll”, or it may even blue-screen during the boot process.

What is the difference between master and slave hard drive?

Slave drives are mostly used for storing data to protect it in the event of a system crash. Master drives usually contain the operating system to run the computer. Computers without a secondary drive set as a slave drive will store their data on the main (only) hard drive, alongside the operating system.

Does formatting a drive wipe it?

Formatting a disk does not erase the data on the disk, only the address tables. It makes it much more difficult to recover the files. For those who accidentally reformat a hard disk, being able to recover most or all the data that was on the disk is a good thing.

Does a factory reset clean the hard drive?

Resetting to Factory Settings During the factory resetting process, your PC’s hard drive is completely erased and you lose any business, financial and personal files that may be present on the computer. Once the resetting process starts, you cannot interrupt it.

How do I activate my second hard drive?

Here’s how to install a second internal hard drive on a Windows 10 computer:

Turn off your PC.
Right-click in the lower-left corner of the screen, and choose Disk Management.
Scroll down the list, and find your new drive, probably marked Unallocated.

Do I need to set jumpers on a SATA drive?

In the IDE system, most motherboards allow you to have two IDE cables. Each cable can connect to two drives. If you are using SATA drives, you do not need to set jumpers for master and slave because each drive gets its own cable.

Why do I have to slave my hard drive?

Slaving a hard drive is usually done primarily for data recovery, an example we see a lot is a hard drive is recognized in the BIOS, but not by Windows. In that case you have to slave the drive since data recovery software doesn’t always work well through USB and Firewire.

How do I change my hard drive to slave?

Using the arrow keys, find and select the hard drive that you attached to the computer. Change the hard drive to “Slave” status. You’ll use the “Configure” or “Change” key to do this as well. Once you see “Slave” to the right (or near) the drive’s name, you can proceed.

Do you need to change the jumper on a hard drive?

If you are simply installing a secondary hard drive for storage, you don’t have to make any changes to the configuration of your current hard drive. If, however, you are installing a second IDE drive, it is possible that you will need to alter the jumper configuration of your primary hard drive.

How to configure master and slave for two hard drives?

This wikiHow teaches you how to determine which of your Windows computer’s two hard drives is the primary and which is the secondary. In order to configure master and slave settings for hard drives, your computer’s motherboard must support multiple internal hard drives and you must have the second hard drive installed.