2 Hard drives in Windows Vista PC

[Jack10525]

My father inlaw has an old Dell Studio 540 vista pc that he asked me to look at. It is running very slow and the video card is possibly going out. I told him it's vista and he needed to buy a new computer. He still insisted I check it out. He also gave me an identical 540 to use for parts if needed. Both pc are in great condition and really seem fine. Yes they are old technology but I think vista is the biggest problem. They have quad core cpu's, 6 gb of ram, dedicated video card and large hard drives. The spare pc that he provided boots up like a new machine. I decided the easiest thing to do was to slave his hard drive into the donor pc. Well I really don't remember vista but I can't figure out how to tell the bios which hard drive to boot to. It's booting to his hard drive I added which seems to be causing the slowness. I need this drive connected so he can use it as storage and retrieve files from it. I'm thinking of just getting an external enclosure and connecting it that way. So if anyone knows how to use 2 hard drives in vista please let me know.

 

[190221]

have you tried defragmenting the old drive?

 

[Deleted member 2121781]

Just switch the HDD boot order and force it to boot the correct drive, then clone the old one. If this fails, you can create a Linux flash drive and copy files as needed to wherever.