Okay hard drive A from PC A has windows 7 on it. I have created PC B that also has windows 7 on it. I didn't reformat or delete anything from Hard Drive A, but it is installed on PC B (or will be soon). PC B has Hard Drive B and has its active copy of windows on that. Is there any way I could get data off of Hard Drive A without putting it back into Computer A? I've got some documents I want to get off it, that I spaced out on not taking that are really important. Or do I have to go and hook it back up to PC A to access info on it?

If I understand what you are saying, the hard drive from PC A, specifically the documents, may give you some difficulty in transferring files. This depends mostly on whether or not the files on PC A were encrypted or not / have specific file permissions. You should be able to transfer them to the new computer without much difficulty.

Does it matter the other hard drive has a windows install on it? No thay aren't encrypted.

if you have enough connectors and the HDs are compatible you may be able to slave HD A to HD B then it should just a matter of copying from one drive to the other

the HD A Win install should only be an issue if you try to boot up using that drive

Nope, that part should not matter. I say "should" because with these things you never know.

I can hook them up both through the mobo, but not sure if I can directly hook both of them togeather if that's what you mean.

Edit
Well it's getting late, I'll have to try in the morning.

Well, one hard drive should be the "master" and the other the "slave." The hard-drive that boots the OS is the master. After that, the OS (Windows 7?) should pick up on the slave hard drive and mount it properly. Transferring files after that should not be an issue.

Alright when I try this tomorrow I'll make sure to set the primary (HD B in this case) to boot then see what happens. Hopefully everything will go well and I can just take the file off.

I've done this multiple times in the past from XP to XP and from XP to Win 7. It's easy enough to do as long as the files aren't somewhere that the OS likes, such as documents. No matter what I did I couldn't get the files from Documents. I ended up using Ubuntu to do it because it don't care about silly little "permissions".

The easiest way to hook up a hard drive to you computer would probably be through USB. You can get SATA to USB connectors pretty easily and it shows up to Windows as just another storage device so no worries about booting unless you have your computer set to boot off of USB first for some reason.

Yea it might be in documents, [censored].... oh well. Yours is another option. If all else fials just quickly hook it back up to the original pc since it still has its mobo and majority of parts.

Crap now this new pc is randomly freezing, this is the third time its happened. *sigh*