Hard Drive swap

[Squallviii]

Hey, I have a Dell Dimension B110 and my father has a Dell Dimension 8400. We want to swap computer systems because he doesnt use it much anymore and i play lots of games. However the object in the way is that we both have things on the hard drive that cant be replaced. Now i Would like to know if simpling switching the hard drives will work without having to do more than set the bios. Can anyone help me?

 

[captaincranky]

No!!!!! Well Maybe....

If the 2 hard drives are identical (or at least compatible) with the motherboard you might be able to swap the drive into the slave position of the IDE buss and transfer most of your data that way. Windows XP has a transfer wizard to help with situations just like the one you're describing. This involves bridging the 2 machines with a USB cable. If you try installing the second hard drive method, you must go into the BIOS and disable the computer's ability to boot from the secondary IDE position. In any event it's not going to be as easy as you envision. On second thought if the motherboards support the same data transfer protocol it could work. Hang out for a while a wait to see if someone else seconds this or has some other ideas.