Reader Box??

[zingo1327]

My hard drive was upgraded to a newer version and I was given the old one for standby. The guys in the shop said i'd need a reader box to access it. There are some programs on the old hard drive that I'd like to transfer to the newer one but what is a reader box and where can I get/buy one. Thank you in advance

[barry1010]

I suspect you are thinking of a caddy which you put your hard drive and connect to your pc via usb

[Atheist]

I think it's a tin box big enough to accxommodate the old drive. You put the drive in the box and then the box should have a wire which enables you to plug it into your computer, perhaps into a USB socket.

I'm sure someone will give you more detailed advice.

 

[barry1010]

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[Atheist]

Oh, well; I'm not completely astray.

[barry1010]

I'm not recommending that one, it is merely an example of a caddy 

[Buenchico]

Like others here, I'm assuming that you need a hard drive enclosure (a.k.a 'caddy') to insert your old drive into.  However there are some possible complications involved here:

Firstly, there are different sizes of hard drives (with laptops using smaller ones than desktop PCs do).  So you'd need to take care to get an enclosure of the right size.

Next, there are different types of hard drives (such as IDE, SATA and SCSI).  You'd need to ensure that you purchased the correct type.

Once you got the correct size and type of enclosure, and installed your old hard drive into it, it's likely that you'd intially find much of its content inaccessible.  That's because you'd need to go through the process of 'taking ownership' of the drive before you could read all of the data on it.

Lastly, you wouldn't be able to transfer the programs on the old drive to the new one anyway.  That's because the programs would need to be installed into the registry on the new drive, for which you'd need the installation media.  (You can't simply copy the program files from one drive to another).

[barry1010]

Buen, would it be possible to create a partition on the new hard drive and use software to clone the old drive to the new?

[barry1010]

Maybe create a virtual pc on the new drive?

[Buenchico]

^^^ It should be possible, Barry, but I can't see why that's not already been done by whoever installed the new drive.  It would have seemed to be an obvious step to me!

[barry1010]

I thought that