how to connect up multiple hard drives

[Hype]

Hi I need to transfer my friend's files off of his hard drive to my hard drive but I dont know how to connect up the two. Does anyone know how to do this? I'm using WinXP if thats relevant.

Any help would be really appreciated

[redandant]

I don't think you can attach 2 harddrive together. What you can do thought.
If the hard drives are external, plug both on the the same computer.

If there are both internal: There are a few things you can do
-Lan, connect both computers by lan.
-Serial, don't need a super advanced setup. only a serial cable and a almost imposible to find progam. to get it to work! ( I DO NOT RECOMEND THIS. ITS REALLY SLOW)
-The last thing i can think of it to open up one of the computers. The more expenisive/newest one is prefered cause you need at least 2 hard drive space. and connect it up this way. thought there is something about the cables you have to pay attetion, something to do with the master slave thing. Google it! once both hard drive are in one computer its easy as pie.

[DarkCyntax]

What he said, but be careful if you both have WinXP installed in your hard-drives, you might fuck up your and your friends windows, happened to me once.
Lan is propably better way to do the file transfer or if you have money buy one of those external hard-drives.

[Panda Man]

LAN or uploading to a server via FTP are really your only options assuming both have xp. your other option is to set the jumpers on your friends HDD to slave and make sure yours is set to master. You have to connect them both to a MoBo. If they use Parallel ATA IDE cables, you can connect them both to on IDE port, as most IDE controllers and cables allow 2 drives to be hooked up simulataneously.

[Xaenn]

Why not just drop em both in the same case? Hook em up (there's no real way to do this wrong, and chances are you have autodetecting for master and slave) and boot up. Consider it gold.

[Kazekage Gaara]

LAN or uploading to a server via FTP are really your only options assuming both have xp. your other option is to set the jumpers on your friends HDD to slave and make sure yours is set to master. You have to connect them both to a MoBo. If they use Parallel ATA IDE cables, you can connect them both to on IDE port, as most IDE controllers and cables allow 2 drives to be hooked up simulataneously.

Thats how I do it but be VERY CAREFUL while handling HDDs once they are out of the computer coz one bad bump and you can fuck up an HDD pretty bad.

Don't know much about 2 windows xp HDDs fucking each other up I haven't tried it as yet coz majority of my friends are still stuck on win98 and win98 CANNOT READ NTFS partition, so they are the ones coming over to me for data transfer with their HDDs.

The SAFEST way I can think of is BURN THE DATA UP ON CDRs or DVDRs. If your friend doesn't have a cd burner or a dvd burner, you can hook up your burner to his comp and burn the data up coz when you do it this way, the risk of fucking things up is quite less

Edit: If you're connecting your friend's HDD to your comp, make sure his HDD doesn't have viruses and spywares and shit but I think its pretty obvious

Edit 2: The jumper settings are pretty easy and are not always the same, aka, jumper settings change from manufacturer to manufacturer, i.e., Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, etc, etc. The jumper settings are most probably "printed" on the HDD itself, so you can refer to the sticker on the HDD for that info. You should make the HDD "master" if you wanna boot ITS OPEARTING SYSTEM and make the other HDD "slave" so its operating system will not be booted.

[Panda Man]

Thats how I do it but be VERY CAREFUL while handling HDDs once they are out of the computer coz one bad bump and you can fuck up an HDD pretty bad.

again, you worry to much. I've dropped a HDD before, and it was a-ok! and most BIOS' will pick up whatever OS is on the HDD set to master. If it REALLY causes a problem, use a boot loader like GRUB to choose which copy you wanna boot.

[El Capitaine]

just put the two comps next to each other, connect them with a crossover LAN cable, and you're golden!

or use a USB flash drive, or select 'Enable Disk Use' in your iPod options and use that

[pkt-zer0]

Bah, I have my comp case open all the time, and I switch HDDs around pretty often. Nothing terrible happened to them yet.

[Panda Man]

Bah, I have my comp case open all the time, and I switch HDDs around pretty often. Nothing terrible happened to them yet.

YOU EVIL WHORE!!!!! Think about all the dust your letting just waltz into there!

[Josh]

I would say the easiest method would be to just put them in a LAN together. It wouldn't be as fast as putting both HDD in the same computer, but it would have decent speed.

[Mishotaki]

YOU EVIL WHORE!!!!! Think about all the dust your letting just waltz into there!

hum..... *compares his case to his roommate's case*
mine= open
me=non smoker
his=closed
him=smoker

mine=almost sparking clean
his=madly dirty

having your case open doesn't make it get more dust.. it depends on the environment.... but if you were to compare an open one and a closed one in the same environment....

anyway mine is staying open... i should redo my processor's thermal paste... change my gf4600ti cuz the fan isn't working anymore... and get a new power supply because the fan is making airplane sounds...