Yes, I am a newbie at this. I have a duplicator tower (1 to 3)with a 200 maxtor hdd (ide).I have 40 dvds stored on it. The question is, does anyone know if I can take the hdd out of my duplictor and place it in my computer? I want to menu and author my dvds with dvd lab. Is this possible or am I way off??? Do I need to anything?? Thanks for reading.
You say the hard drive is IDE (Also known as ATA)? Then you should be able to connect it to your computer through a normal IDE channel. Most optical drives (CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, etc.) still use these 40-pin ATA connections, but your hard drives might not (I think most run Serial Attached SCSI, also known as SATA, just because it's much faster and smaller). If your hard drives still run on ATA and you have a parallel ribbon (An ATA ribbon with three connections, one motherboard, a Master HD and a Slave HD), then just pull out the hard drive from your duplicator (if there are jumper pins on the drive, make sure the drive is set to SLAVE, not MASTER) and plug it in to the ribbon, but leave your computers hard drive intact. Don't touch it. Otherwise, you can pull out one of the ATA connections from an optical drive and use that. I don't know if you're planning on transfering these movies over or what, but depending on your hard ware you might be without an optical drive while you're doing this. You might have to fumble around in DOS to get your computer to talk to it, but that's a bridge we haven't crossed yet. Crack open your computer and your duplicator and check things out. If you need help identifying, feel free to ask.
