Win7 SATA Drive as a slave to a new Win10 Machine

[qballbandit]

Hello,
My 10 year old WIN7 machine breathed it's last breath last week, and I believe it was the motherboard. Not wanting to sink bucks into an old machine, I am having a new WIN10 gaming machine configured.
Believing that my old mechanical hdd still functions, I'd like to backup up everything that I haven't since my last backup.
What do I need to know if I want to plug this old drive into the new MOBO/SATA ports, temporarily, in order to perform my backup?

"SLAVE" may have not been the correct terminology; secondary?

Thanks very much for any advice and direction provided.

[geepster775]

With the new UEFI in today's systems replacing legacy BIOS, you no longer have to worry about the old hard drive jumpers of the past.

Whatever Sata port your main system drive is plugged into becomes Disk 0. You can add other drives to other sata ports, even prior system drives, and the system will automatically set those additional drives as Disk 1, 2 etc and allocate drive letters according to the next available drive letter.

If the add-on drives are formatted GPT, (and all of my occasional sata port plug-ins are) there is no problem. If the old drive was not GPT formatted, it will load and read on the new system, but then attempting to load it in a non-GPT systems (like an XP machine) afterwards will come up as needing a chkdsk run. But I do very limited number of recurring disk crossovers between newer and old machines.

[qballbandit]

Thanks geep, I appreciate the information.

[EricF]

Worst-case scenario, you'll have to use the Disk Management snap-in to make Windows recognize the disk and manually assign a letter to it.

Start > Type "Disk Management" and let instant search bring up "Create and format hard disk partitions", and click on it.
The Disk Management interface will find all disk drives connected, even ones that didn't get letters assigned by default. Find your disk and assign a drive letter to it's data partition. There's an "Action" item on the menu bar, and if you click on it, you have an option to "Rescan disks" which will make even stubborn drives appear.

Note, the graphic list that shows the partition maps of each disk doesn't scroll with the mouse wheel. You have to use the scroll bar the old-fashioned way. Thanks, Microsoft!

[qballbandit]

Thanks very much, Eric!