When my old old XP computer died due to a power supply malfunction, I bought another XP machine. I removed the hard drive from the old old box and put it in a hard drive enclosure. That way I could access my old projects and save new ones to it.
Now my old computer is getting a little long in the tooth, and my new computer is W7.
As I understand it, the enclosure (with XP on it) won't work with the new W7 machine. Is that true?
So, I'll need to get some sort of external hard drive that will work with both XP and W7 and resave everything to it? Is there such a thing and can I get it where I work?
Recommendations welcome. Advice required.

By default, Win7 uses a different disk format to XP but it can still read/write in the old format.
 
My advice would be to copy all the folders you want to keep to a new drive on the new computer, then throw out the old drive.

Karyn
By default, Win7 uses a different disk format to XP but it can still read/write in the old format.
 
My advice would be to copy all the folders you want to keep to a new drive on the new computer, then throw out the old drive.

After copying what he needs to the Win7 drive...........instead of throwing out the old XP drive, he could format this drive and use it as an additional data drive no?

Mesh

Karyn
By default, Win7 uses a different disk format to XP but it can still read/write in the old format.
 
My advice would be to copy all the folders you want to keep to a new drive on the new computer, then throw out the old drive.

After copying what he needs to the Win7 drive...........instead of throwing out the old XP drive, he could format this drive and use it as an additional data drive no?

Yes, but I was thinking in terms of it's age and thus, reliability.  He describes it as the original drive from his original XP box, which makes it up to  11 - 12 years old...   I know I wouldn't trust it.  And the entire thing could be dumped to a folder on an SD card...
 Better to throw out an old, working drive after copying the data than trying to recover data from an old, dead drive..

Karyn

Mesh

Karyn
By default, Win7 uses a different disk format to XP but it can still read/write in the old format.
 
My advice would be to copy all the folders you want to keep to a new drive on the new computer, then throw out the old drive.

After copying what he needs to the Win7 drive...........instead of throwing out the old XP drive, he could format this drive and use it as an additional data drive no?

Yes, but I was thinking in terms of it's age and thus, reliability.  He describes it as the original drive from his original XP box, which makes it up to  11 - 12 years old...   I know I wouldn't trust it.  And the entire thing could be dumped to a folder on an SD card...
 Better to throw out an old, working drive after copying the data than trying to recover data from an old, dead drive..

Oh yeah, if it's 11-12 years old it might be better to sell on E-bay as an antique . HD's are fairly cheap now and even SSD's aren't too bad.....just the larger (1TB +) get's a bit expensive. I'd love to have all my samples on a 3 TB SSD......(still playing the lotto for that). 
I like the snappiness/quick boot time of the OS SSD......might want to consider this as well Greg. 
 

What Karyn said.  Not worth the risk when you can buy a new 3TB hard drive suitable for archiving for only a little over $100 now...  ($109.99 on Newegg for example.)

^ What Craig said..I keep all my projects on an external drive (USB), and back up any files (word processing, spreadsheet & stuff) from my 'C' drive to it weekly. The projects are also backed up to DVD.

^^What James said about Craig said about Karyn.......^^.....nuff said?

Or, as we say in the FSF, "Monkey see, monkey do do!" 

Reliability in a backup drive is highly overrated. What are the chances that the primary drive and the backup drive will fail simultaneously? If the backup is good for one read, it has served its purpose.