I ordered an HD enclosure yesterday, it should be arriving shortly actually. I have the drive off my old computer that I want to put in there. It runs XP and has some old games and other stuff I'd like to recover if the drive still works, which I think it does. Since it has XP on it, once I get it installed and hooked up to my Win7 machine, will it boot up or do I need to do any sort of configuring to get it going? Also, I have an older drive with WinME on it. Would that work as well?
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HD enclosures
- Thread starter boc61
- Start date
No your computer won't try to boot off it unless you select it as a boot drive in Bios. It might be a good idea to temporarily transfer the stuff you want to another drive the download Active Killdisk to entirely wipe the old drive so you can start afresh with a clean drive.
Assuming your bios will allow booting from an external device it will probably boot but you won't have the correct drivers, I'd check you can get ones for your current system and have them handy for when XP starts complaining, may have to reactivate XP as well although I got away with just moving a drive once.
What old games? I haven't found much from some of the old Win95, Win98 stuff that won't work, I just added the games drive I was using in XP to a Win7 PC.
Win ME? might have a serious driver issue there depending on how new your current setup is, better off running that in some kind of emulator or virtual machine.
What old games? I haven't found much from some of the old Win95, Win98 stuff that won't work, I just added the games drive I was using in XP to a Win7 PC.
Win ME? might have a serious driver issue there depending on how new your current setup is, better off running that in some kind of emulator or virtual machine.
Hmmm, I'm beginning to think I should have looked into this further before ordering the thing. Reactivating XP may be a problem as I don't have the code anywhere. The machine didn't come with install discks, just the hidden recovery partition. I've long since discarded the case so I can't reference the sticker.
The main game I want to try to get going is Allied general. it's very old, a Win95 game. I tried installing it under various compatability modes, but no luck.
The main game I want to try to get going is Allied general. it's very old, a Win95 game. I tried installing it under various compatability modes, but no luck.
Ah Allied General, that takes me back a bit!
Long shot but if you have a win85 win98 or ME install disk you could use virtual box and install one of them in it https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox it's free, I've used it in Linux but there is a Windows version you can use in Win7.
Or see here, seems they got it to work, last post: http://panzercentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=47568&p=681753&hilit=windows#p681753
Long shot but if you have a win85 win98 or ME install disk you could use virtual box and install one of them in it https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox it's free, I've used it in Linux but there is a Windows version you can use in Win7.
Or see here, seems they got it to work, last post: http://panzercentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=47568&p=681753&hilit=windows#p681753
Hmmm, I'm beginning to think I should have looked into this further before ordering the thing. Reactivating XP may be a problem as I don't have the code anywhere. The machine didn't come with install discks, just the hidden recovery partition. I've long since discarded the case so I can't reference the sticker.
The main game I want to try to get going is Allied general. it's very old, a Win95 game. I tried installing it under various compatability modes, but no luck.
Indeed. My PC crashed a few weeks ago and when I managed to get it running the internet regarded it as a "new computer" and most of the stuff I had on an old HDD didn't work when I tried to move it. Good luck though.
As a matter of interest I recently built a new computer and installed Win 7 as the O/S. I also took both of the hard drives from my old set-up and added these to the 250 GB SSD I had bought for the new rig. These older HDs had been running under XP SP3 and without any special attention from me continue to function quite well under the new O/S. This includes programs that were installed on these drive via XP as well as Trainz 04 and 06 on one of the drives. It surprised me that it was as simple as that, I can tell you. The only issue I had was that it seems that Win 7 changed all the data files to "Read Only" status and I have since found a way to overcome that problem.
Cheers
Russell.
Cheers
Russell.
A bit of an update. I got the HD hooked up and plugged it in and it showed up fine as just another usb device. I recovered some files I wanted, but much to my chagrin I didn't have Allied General installed on the drive. I tried installing it using the info from JP Panzer's (Seeing that place again brought back memories, Thanks clam.), but none worked. It seems that those methods will work on 32 bit versions of Win 7 but not 64 bit. However, I dod find there that someone has put together "PG Forever" which is an improved version of Panzer/Allied General that works in Win 7. The only drawback is all of the movies, voiceovers and combat animations don't work, but at least you can still play the game.
Not being technical astute, I mistakenly assumed (hoped?) that putting the old HD in that box would make it a little XP computer that I could plug in whenever I wanted, I never thought about drivers and bios settings and such.So worst case I have an extra 80GB of storage space. Not enough for all my Trainz stuff, but it'll come in handy for sure. It's a nice little box, and I had a gift card credit on amazon that got it for me for half price essentially. Thanks for all the replies.
Not being technical astute, I mistakenly assumed (hoped?) that putting the old HD in that box would make it a little XP computer that I could plug in whenever I wanted, I never thought about drivers and bios settings and such.So worst case I have an extra 80GB of storage space. Not enough for all my Trainz stuff, but it'll come in handy for sure. It's a nice little box, and I had a gift card credit on amazon that got it for me for half price essentially. Thanks for all the replies.
Hi boc61,
Unlike Mac OS, Windows cannot be dumped into a different computer and be expected to boot nicely. What you can do though, is make a Windows XP partition on your primary hard drive (or secondary drive, if you have multiple) clone the XP data from the enclosure into this new partition. When this is done you should be able to dual-boot XP and Windows 7. Of course, some drivers for your new computer will need to be installed in XP to get it up to speed.
Cheerio,
Nicholas
Unlike Mac OS, Windows cannot be dumped into a different computer and be expected to boot nicely. What you can do though, is make a Windows XP partition on your primary hard drive (or secondary drive, if you have multiple) clone the XP data from the enclosure into this new partition. When this is done you should be able to dual-boot XP and Windows 7. Of course, some drivers for your new computer will need to be installed in XP to get it up to speed.
Cheerio,
Nicholas
Install the Windows XP Compatibility mode. This is a download from Microsoft and is different than the compatibility mode-tab in the properties. This is actually an XP virtual machine that will launch right from your Windows 7 start menu when you install an application for Windows XP Compatibility mode.
There are settings, which I can't think of offhand, that will let you adjust the video so you have more colors and a bigger screen, but it works pretty well. The alternative is DOSBox which lets you run older programs in an MS-DOS environment.
John
There are settings, which I can't think of offhand, that will let you adjust the video so you have more colors and a bigger screen, but it works pretty well. The alternative is DOSBox which lets you run older programs in an MS-DOS environment.
John