Can i swop hard drives

Is it true? I remember i had a hard drive desktop with Windows XP installed on it, but no computer drives. I took that hard drive and I installed it on my dell desktop and it booted up to the start up screen of windows XP. Basically, my question is, can you swap any hard drive and it will boot up to what ever OS it has installed on it if it has one , and if it doesn't have an OS, it will just start up with a black screen?

Hawkeye22 Glorious Moderator. Feb 10, 11, 1 47, 1, No, in most cases it won't work. Windows has all the device drivers and chipset drivers installed for the current system. When moving it to a different system, the OS will usually fail to boot. In some cases it can be fixed with a repair install. In all cases, it is recommended to do a clean install. Hawkeye22 :. Even then, you should check the device manager for devices with an exlamation point next to them.

These need their drivers updated. A repair install may fix the problem, but you may be left with excess bloat or something that may cause problems down the road. A clean install is recommended when changing motherboards. You didn't say what your OS is. If you do a clean install, do a custom install.

It's best to recreate the partition so you are sure all old data is gone. Oct 30, 32, 9 99, 4, QQCCA3 :. JackNaylorPE :. You might be able to get away with it and get it limping along but it would be a "kludge" and never perform or be as hassle free as a fresh install. A little planning goes a long way here. Many games and some programs will continue to function however some will have to be reinstalled over themselves to establish registry settings.

Installing over a program generally retains all customizations, etc. Yes, you only need one partition for windows. If you clean install to the OS partition C in yor case , the other partition D in your case will be fine. Feb 9, 5 0 4, 0. Hi I just had to do the same thing for my wife's pc. Then I used aoemi backupper to clone the harddrive so that I would not lose any data if it failed.

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Change the Size of the Touch Keyboard. However, the hard drive is one of the most critical components in your system because it stores all of your information. Everything from your operating system to your emails to your favorite songs are stored on your hard drive.

Obviously, a straight replacement will leave you without that information. If you're using a computer that has more than one hard drive bay you'll find the process of transferring data from one drive to another to be easy. All you need to do is install the second hard drive in your system and then clone an image of your existing drive using one of the many freeware tools available for this task.

Once the old drive's image has been cloned and placed on the new drive, you can simply remove the old drive or reformat it and use it as a second drive make sure the clone was successful before taking this step, however! Computers that have only a single drive bay are more difficult to work with because you can't have the new and old drive installed at the same time.

You can, however, still clone your old drive to your new one. Cloning a drive may take some time because of the bandwidth limitations of USB 2. Desktop computer hard drives are usually placed in the lower front half of a mid-tower enclosure.

They are attached using between two and six screws. Once the drive is in place, you just need to plug in the SATA data cable. This connects to your motherboard.

Then you connect the power cables to your power supply unit. The next time you boot up your machine, you should be able to see the new hard drive in your BIOS. Laptops are different, as some laptops will offer a plastic hard drive bay cover on the bottom of the laptop that is held in with one or two screws.

Removing the cover will reveal the drive, which is itself typically attached with a few screws. Installing a replacement drive is simply a matter of taking the existing drive out and putting the new drive in its place. The power and data connections are built into the mount itself, so you don't have to worry about tracking down the cables. Please note that not all laptops are intended to be user serviceable in this way. So please read your laptop's manual for information about hard drive replacement before proceeding.

Once you've replaced your old drive you'll want to boot up your PC. This way you can make sure everything is functioning well.