I have a new PC with XP Home and would like to install the hard drive from my old Me PC as a slave to access old data. The new PC sees the drive in BIOS and in the Device Manager but does not show it under My Computer. The drive also shows up under Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management but without a drive letter. The manufacturer's support technician said I would have to remove Me from the drive. Is there some other way to gain access to the old drive in the new machine? I don't want to have dual operating systems, only to have access to the old data.

Hi Gordon, I've done the same thing in the past and all I did was set the jumper on the slave drive and boot it up. In the BIOS, you may have to set the Primary/Slave either to AUTO or LBA. Bob

Thanks! I checked the BIOS and the slave is set to Auto and the two drives are recognized properly as master and slave. Both drives are listed in the device manager/proerties as having a "master boot record" partition style. Is this a problem? If so can I change it?

Gordon, two suggestions. First, the problem is that you have two drives both setup as Master with Primary partitions. That confuses the computer, because you can't have two HDs running concurrently as Master. #1. Try disconnecting the power cable from your main XP drive, and keep the ME drive connected. Set the jumper on ME to master. Then reboot. ME may (or may not) boot up; then save your data off-computer and you are done. #2. Find a computer that is currently running Me and switch drives. If you want, you can hose down the ME drive, install NTFS on it, set it to slave and use it for additional storage.

NO NO NO Just go to osloader.com download osloader and install it on your xp drive. When you are done doing that, change your ME drive to a slave by changing the jumpers. restart your computer and BOOOOM you have ME and Xp to choose from whichever you want to boot with. I have done this on 3 machines in my house. If you like OSloader you may have to buy it, but its worth the money there is a 30 day trial period. Also look at it this way, if your Xp goes down then you can still boot up with ME and Vice Versa. Post back and questions i am looking at this for the next 24hours.

ranchhand, Thanks for identifying the problem. I have found a 2000 machine that recognized the Me drive as a slave in spite of the MBR partition (after assigning the drive a letter name) and I copied the data to a DVD and then to the XP master drive. I will next reformat the Me drive for storage. By the way, this discussion forum is by far the best I have visited -- my compliments to the users and managers!

roaming phantom, Thanks for the suggestion. As I am rather far down the path and don't have an immediate need for multiple operating systems, I won't use OSloader for this job. However, it looks like a good approach that could prove useful in other projects here. In particular, we work with a number of scientific cameras that seem to require different operating systems and this would be a lot better than the current stack of PCs!