Hard Drive Switching????

[scoby222]

Okay heres my deal, a friend of mine gave me their old PC thinking it would be something for me to play around with. In my current PC i'm running WIN XP with an intel cel. 1 processor. My friends PC has a Intel Pet 3 which i'd rather be using. Is there anyway to take my hard drive out of my system and put it in the other system? Friends system has WIN 98 OS, i would want to use my drive with XP. Is this possible? Is there any kind of info need to help me. thanks in advance!

P.S cant switch the CPU's diff slots

 

[Rik]

If you swap the hard drive to the other pc you will need to reinstall xp anyway.

 

[KingCody]

What model Celeron does your current system have? and what model P3 does your "new" system have? the P3 may not be an upgrade

as far as swapping HDDs go...

It is always recommended to format and clean install the OS when moving a HDD into a new system, however it will sometimes work by simply installing it.

If it does not boot up, then you can boot from your XP install CD and perform a "replair" install to re-write all the system files to work with the new hardware.

If after the "repair" install it still won't boot or won't run stable, then you will have to format/clean install XP.

p.s. you will need a retail version of XP to use it in another machine, usually OEM XP recovery disks will not work in other systems, and it is against MS EULA

 

[mailpup]

Besides the operating system issues, you will have to install all of the motherboard and other applicable drivers for the "new" system unless the two motherboards are identical which they are not.

 

[KingCody]

Besides the operating system issues, you will have to install all of the motherboard and other applicable drivers for the "new" system unless the two motherboards are identical which they are not.

not always... I changed my mobo/cpu from an Abit AN7 with an AthlonXP 2500+ to an ASrock 939Dual-SATA2 with an Athlon64 3000+. Those are two very different setups... i swapped the mobo/cpu and booted up. XP installed all the necessary drivers and it worked fine.

I ran it like that for about 2 weeks with no problems. I eventually formatted and re-installed XP anyways, so I don't know if it would have ever had any stability issues. I would assume that it would have at some point... but I can't be sure.