well...kind of. One is an HDD question and one is a OS question.

1. I have my old notebook HDD and I want to put it in a desktop I'm building (adapter yeah, yada, yada) and run it as a slave to my new HDD, just for backup purposes. Problem: my new HDD is a SATA 300 and the notebook, obviously, is not. Is there a problem with hooking them up to the same cable?


2. I have XP on my notebook HDD, but I have absolutely no idea where my CDs went. any way to transfer XP to the new HDD? Or am I just gonna have to suck it up and buy XP again?

Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif !!!

Install the new drive to the SATA connectors with corresponding cable needed. Use a regular ide cable and install the laptop harddrive with a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor to an ide connector on your new motherboard.

On a running pc, download the SATA drive's utilities from the respective manufacturer. Make either a bootable floppy or a bootable .iso cd and boot your pc with it. Use the utilities to clone from the laptop HDD to the SATA drive. This should make the SATA drive bootable with your current XP install. All the data, files, malware and viruses,,, uh, hopefully not all that :eek: , will get transferred to the new drive.

Edit:
You may run into some problems with registering your new pc however as well as some hardware issues could develop. I was not considering all variables when I posted the above.