> I have no idea how to move a hard drive from one computer to another, or set them up as master/slave. I'm not even sure which connecter goes where!

Allright, here's my crack at it:

First off, it's pretty simple. If you have the teeniest bit of mechanical competency, you can probably figure out how the hard drive is connected to the computer by looking at it. It's mounted in a little metal doo-hicky at the front of the case (with the rest of your drives) with probably 4-8 screws (you'll want a decent set of screwdrivers, and it's of great help if they're magnetically tipped... usually a phillips will get you by just fine, but I find it handy to have a couple different sizes and also a flathead or two since you do find odd screws). To take the drive out, just unscrew it from the thing it's mounted into and slide it out. Depending on how big your case is this may be a bit of a pain.

However, before you just yank it out (and when you do remove it, make sure to do it slowly and steadily... if it won't come out easily, make *sure* it's just in there tight and not jammed before applying force) disconnect it. There will be two cables hooked up to it: one will be a gray, flat, ribbony cable that runs to the motherboard. This is your IDE cable (I'm going to assume you have IDE drives and not SCSI, since you almost certainly do), and it is used to The other will be a smaller set of a couple multi-colored wires that will run to the power supply. It's very easy to tell these apart.

Allright, once you've got it out of the case is the time to mess with the jumper settings to turn it to slave/master. On the back of the drive will be a set of like 8 pins, and probably in a 2 rows of 4 arrangement. There *should* be a jumper (plastic piece that covers two pins) somewhere on it. If you're lucky, you've also got a sticker or something somewhere on it that details pin settings for primary master, primary slave, etc. (how exactly you do this will be determined by how your computer is set up... if I had to guess, I'd say that you can probably safely have one be primary master and the other primary slave pretty safely, but...) Just move the jumper to the desired position and you should be done with that part. Hooking it back up is just a matter of reversing what you did the previous time. When you hook the IDE cable up, you may be confused as to which way it goes in (this does matter... with like the power cable, you should only be able to hook it in the right way). I suggest that you note which way it goes in while you're taking it apart, but if you get confused: there will be a pink line running down one end of the IDE cable. This is what's called "Pin 1". The general rule is that Pin 1 goes into the side closest to the power connector. This isn't *always* the case but it's a pretty good rule.

Once you have everything hooked back together, you may need to go into your BIOS and set things up (most things are auto-detected these days, but it's still wise to double check). Hit or F9 or whatever it says at startup to "Enter Setup" and try and find something like "HDD Detection" or "IDE Setup". Go in there and confirm that it's detecting both drives and has them set for their proper sizes. If you're getting problems you may have to specify this manually. When you have your hard drives out, write down the number of cylinders/heads/sectors each has (this should be listed on the top of the drive), and specify it yourself.

Jeez, that sounded a lot harder than it is. Really, installing a hard drive is freaking simple these days, but I don't know how old your old computer is, so it may prove to be a pain. The only problem you're really likely to run into is configuring the drives once they're installed, but if all else fails just messing with it until you get something that works may be an option :P

Ste "Probably forgot something" phen