Hi,

I'm going to buy a new system, and I have 2 SATA hard disks from my old
system. One is installed with a Linux OS, the other with Windows
Vista.

For the Linux hard disk, will I be able to simply use these 2 hard disks on the new system and boot up, retaining all my data? If not, how do I transfer the data from my old hard disks to my new hard disks? My old system is faulty (no signal to monitor), so I can't just copy everything directly using, say, a portable hard disk.

Thank you.

Regards,
Rayne

You could try to connect your 2 hds to your new system and boot it with a linux live CD like Knoppix. After that you could copy all your important files to a portable hard disk.

Regards

Can I just connect the old Linux hard disk to the new system, boot into the NEW linux hard disk and see the old hard disk like I would if I plug in a flash drive? Then copy the files over to the new disk?

Yes, you can. When you boot to the new system, run as root:
You will see the new disk as /dev/sda, and any other disks as /dev/sdb, or /dev/sdc and so on. For this example will say your old Linux disk is /dev/sdb, and has three partitions, sdb1, sdb2 ,sdb3. The fdisk command will show the type of the partition, type 83 is Linux, 82 is swap.

Make a temporary mount point for each partition you want to mount under /mnt.
You can mount the old disk with:

This will put each partition in a separate directory. You can then copy all your files over to your new system.

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