Back again with another PC hardware question...
 

I've recently been given a PC for free. I was hoping to take the hard drive out of my old PC and use it in this new one as well as the hard drive it came with. Will that be possible? What do I need to do?

Yeah, unscrew it, take it out and plug it in the new PC.

Only problem is, Windows may need to be re-installed if you're going to use it as the main hard drive.

Any reason for that? Is it just because you want to keep the info you currently have? If, so, you can put the older hard drive in and use it as a regular storage drive, still allowing you access to your old files.

My intention was to use the old drive (after it's been reformatted) purely as a storage device. Would I need to re-install Windows, etc on to it in this case?

Nope.

You just need to set the old drive to a 'slave' setting rather than a 'master' setting.

Tabs should be on the back of the drive to adjust the setting.

Almost forgot about this.

Can't seem to find a free connector to hook the old hard drive up!?

What kind of connector does the hard drive use?

It's got to be IDE, judging by the age of his old PC.

Problem is, a lot of SATA-equipped motherboards (if this PC is newer) only have one IDE channel supporting 2 devices, which will probably already be taken up with the existing HD and CD/DVD drive.

If it doesn't have the cable spare, you can buy a USB hard drive enclosure and used the HD as an external drive.

There are also PCI cards with IDE seats on them. I use one to transfer data from one drive to another when I'm clearing one of the office computers for an upgrade.
Let me clarify, I have already transferred the data to the new computer, I am clearing data off the old HDDs to a backup HDD so that they can be formatted.

I think, all in all, this isn't gonna work as I hoped.

For one, the graphics card that I recently bought doesn't seem compatable. Whilst it will fit in the slot, there's no connection to power it.