Old laptop hard drive

I've just purchased a new laptop. I need help with the following:

Is there a USB cable to connect my old laptop to the new one as an external drive, so I can transfer some files, etc. Or is there a device to connect the old laptop hard drive to a new laptop via a cable after removing it from the old machine?

 

Save Old content via CD, burn CD, place CD new laptop ??

 

You can buy an enclosure, then remove the old HD out from the laptop, and put that in the enclosure,then plug it into your laptop, and now its an external HD

 

buy a crossover cable (cat6 i think), set up a local network between the two, and transfer away.

 

External drives are nice for backups.

 

If you are going to just plop the drive in an enclosure, you might need to do some work to get rid of the file security to transfer your files. I had some troubles with this on my computer, took me a few hours to figure out, but now I can do it and have my files transferring in 15 minutes. The external route is nice, I have 3 external drives now to put files wherever I want. Check out newegg, you can probably pick up an enclosure for $10, if not $20 for sure.

 

calebschmerge,

can you elaborate on what the security problem and fix was? i've never heard of that happening; do you mean problems seeing an NTFS partition from a FAT partition or similar? it would be nice to be able to archive the problem/fix for others.

 

if you run winxp and you selected to make the files under your user acount "private", you'll be denied access to them from any account but your own (including if the drive is set up as a slave or external) until you override the permissions.

 

This is EXACTLY what I was looking to do. Thank you so much for educating me on these "enclosure" devices - having just replaced my laptop after 5 years of use, this is the first I've ever thought of doing this. Now I'll have a 40GB external drive to supplement things. Perfecto.