hard drive swap?

greetings,

.....although i don't think it will work well, or at all, can a 160gb hd be taken out of 1 computer and substituted and put in another (single drive - not as slave) and will anything work? i realize all the hardware differences but, i have a cousin that wanted to see it in writing...thanks again for your help!

You can easily swap ide or SATA drives from case to case. But whether the OS and installed programs will work is another matter. If you are running some Linux distributions you could get a little further there then Windows; XP especially due to the hardware detection and installation logs. Plan on a fresh install of Windows there.

If you're using XP, the only thing you'll have to worry about is the Busmaster drivers. Change them to the default Microsoft ones. When you put it in the new machine, it will detect all the new devices. You then do a registry edit to unhide the old devices, select View > Show hidden devices in the Device Manager, then you can delete all the old devices, which will be indicated by the faded icons...



And voila!! You've got a perfectly working installation of XP on the new machine. You might have to reactivate it though, but that's no big deal.

...thanks for the reply...he has a fully functional computer and hard drive with operating system, files, etc., that he wants to place into a faster computer (no linux) with no current hard drive. i suspect that it will not run or work properly...agreed?

When saving the drive from the old case here Windows had to have a fresh install in order to get the new activation code. You want XP to have a fresh detection when there is that amount of hardwares plus a clean registry to start off with. Backing up any data and files temporarily will also help for restoration on the new partition.

Read my post... I suspect you are trying to tell your friend that it will not work, but that is anything but true. It is guaranteed to work. It doesn't take much brain power to do it, either. I don't know where this stupid Linux idea came from, but all you have to do is change that one driver and it will boot just fine. All you have to do is reactivate it, but that will go without a hitch. Windows will generate a new hash number for his hardware and you can then activate it. You might have to activate it over the phone.



Trust me, this works. If you need a tutorial I will pull up a link to one.

...thanks for the reply!...damn, that was fast!. .........ok, the hard drive being placed into the new computer will acclimate itself to it's new environment and after reactivation, it should work fine(?)..(!)......i didn't know that! .......as my father always said, "ya learn something new every day"......thanks guys!

Yeah, it will adjust. You might have to pamper it for a while.. A warm blanket. A bottle here and there. Maybe a bedtime story.. But it will make the adjustment fairly quickly. After that you're only steps away from having it litter trained. lol

I can pull a long list of links that advise against it like the article here.
Advisory: Changing an OEM XP system motherboard to a non-factory replacement motherboard or moving a hard drive with OEM XP preinstalled to a non-OEM system is not advised. Besides the possibility of being in non-compliance with the OEM EULA, and the practice of OEM's electing to provide a set of restore disks or hidden restore folders on the hard drive to satisfy Microsoft's restore requirement. The lack of a proper bootable XP CD will not allow a repair install to configure XP to the new hardware. Since the repair install in my opinion is an absolute necessity when changing a motherboard or moving a hard drive with XP installed, I would not attempt booting into the new configuration when the option to do a repair install is not an option. If you do make the choice to boot Windows XP without doing the repair install, I highly recommend you either create an image of the hard drive or make sure you have all important data that can not be replaced from other media backed up. http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xpfrm.html

..OK, here is the monkey wrench in the whole post...



.......he has a huge hard drive as previously mentioned however, he has 4 partitions and in each he is using win 98se and win mellenium (one or the other) on all 4 partitions.....how bad does that screw things up?