Transferring data

[rodders]

Just put new vista/xp hybird onto a new hard drive. Have put my old HD onto slave drive and I want to transfer stuff fomr old drive to new one, but only a few things. Some text files, loads of excel spreadsheets, and also actual programs like creative fx music player etc...I don't know if any of this is possible, but when I try to go into my old documents on the slave drive (F), it says access denied and won't let me in. Any ideas how I can do this?

[Miz]

Follow the instructions in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article, How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP to get access to the files.

Yes, you can drag and drop or copy and paste files from one drive to another.

Programs are a different deal. Programs, with rare exceptions, place files all over the drive and usually make numerous registry entries. It's next to impossible to track them all down and move them. Programs will have to be reinstalled.

If the programs that are on the slave drive, which is probably designated as the D drive, won't work, it's because when the program was installed, the old drive was C. Now when it looks on the C drive, its files aren't there. Programs aren't smart enough to know the old C is now named D.