No you're right. My backup plan was to throw the maxtor into my computer and send the files from that maxtor to the wd 120gb in the old dell. The reason i was trying to avoid that was because thats more of pain since i already had the maxtor in the old computer. Now i have to swap hard drives in my comp for the maxtor and wait for my slow wireless network to send 3+ gb through the network at 200 ~ 300 kbps. Oh well, that's what i'll have to do.
I was actually having another problem -- the initial problem that started this thing in the first place. There are two dells, the old one i have been talking about and a new one. I'll call the old one white and the new one black (thats their case color clearly).
The reason I am swapping hard drives in the first place is because black's maxtor crashed. When i first set up the black computer, i had only the maxtor on channel 1 and a dvd/cd-rw combo on channel 2. The bios gave me a warning saying it couldn't find secondary device 0 or something. It then gave me the option of continuing by pressing f1. I did press f1 thinking it was no big deal. I booted to win xp install cd and threw windows on the maxtor. After about 3 days of running, windows gave my friend the same error that the bios did and then proceeded to give him the blue STOP screen of death.
The weird thing is however, that the black computer formerly was operating peacefully with one hard drive. He then added another one but now on the third go-round of updating "black" it is having issues.
I don't understand computers. Any advice/info?