Sean, is your CD-ROM on a separate IDE cable from your hard drive? If so, just unplug the cable from the CD-ROM and plug it into your old hard drive. If it defaults to master without a jumper, it should work fine if it's on its own cable.

ETA: I'm assuming in the above you're just planning on plugging the old drive in long enough to get the data off of it, not leaving it there permanently.

Yeah, it's a temporary thing, Kalshane. And yes, there's a seperate cable for the CD drive. I guess as long as one drive boots and can mount the other one, it doesn't matter which is the boot drive, I just copy the old files over, pull the old drive and be done.

Well, the CD-ROM should be on the secondary IDE. Which means if you hook up the old drive to that cable, and the new drive to the original IDE cable (which should be plugged into the primary IDE port on the motherboard already) it will boot from the new drive. The jumper settings only apply to the individual cable/IDE port.

I don't have the requisite ADCness to report it, Rob, so you should. Is there a way to look at fix progress from the outside? Now I'm all curious.

I reported the bug. Only I can look at the progress, but I'll report back when the status changes.

I ran into a client whose computer had mysteriously slowed down. I asked questions, and it turned out that it happened after a failed attempt to print to pdf useing the PDF write print driver bundled with Acrobat. It turned out the file was still in the printer driver queue eating up 80%+ of CPU time. Deleted it from the queue. Tested it. That driver is frelled. It happens every time. So I'm going to do the obvious - delete and reinstall pdf write from the Acrobat CD. If that does not work I'll delete Acrobat and reinstall from CD. (And if that does not work, rather screw around with it more I'll put in some inexpensive third party software that provides the same "print file to pdf" service as acrobat.) But I still wonder: has anyone run into this with Acrobat? Any thoughts on why this happens?

I haven't seen that, but Acrobat is buggy. On my computer, Acrobat and Reader spend their time having hissy fits over shared files.

So, in further developments:

I got both drives up and running, copied over most of the files I need, and during the process I discovered that there were a couple of infected files on the old drive. My CA anti-virus caught and cleaned them. They were apparently temporary Internet files or something.

Also, just copying over the program files for the music converter didn't work. It was a special one day promotional giveaway, so I figured I'd need to find registry keys to convince it that I was allowed to run the thing, and sure enough.... It was worth a try though.

Actually, the paid version isn't that expensive. I may just buy it outright, like a good citizen.

Some software anti-piracy schemes rely on files being written to specific physical locations on hard drives. Or is that technique not used anymore? (It's obviously something that's not gonna work with disk defrag software, unless the defrag software leaves those files alone.)

Only I can look at the progress, but I'll report back when the status changes.

It's been marked as a duplicate of a bug already under investigation. Whether it will ever be fixed is a question.