First off - thanks to the authors and all the people that respond for this great resource; I've gotten detailed and relevant answers here to the most narrow technical questions.
Today, I'm wondering if I should keep my old P4 machine (10 years old - Intel D850MV board, Windows XP) for housing multiple new high-capacity SATA hard drives (3TB) I'll be buying for backup.
I've purchased an IDE SATA Card (http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=509) having 4 SATA ports, and am hoping I could move SATA hard drives between these 4 internal ports and my other newer computer - a Core i7 build with native SATA ports built on the motherboard (ASUS P6T), as easily as I can move external USB hard drives between machines.
So - maybe too much background, but it sets the environment for the question:
Can I easily move large 3 TB SATA hard drives across machines with different Windows operating systems (Windows XP, Windows 7 32 and 64 bit, assuming the same file system NTFS), without the risk of losing my data due to some sort of operating system/BIOS 'initialization' of the drives as I as move and plug the SATA cable of the drives across machines ? If so, are there any preferred methods to creating the partitions to avoid losing the data ?
Thanks in advance!