old hard drive in new pc?

calcio1

've just bought a new pc

It has a hard drive but no operating system

can I put my old hard drive in and boot from that using its operating system without problems?

devizes18193

proberly not , it would e like gong to sleep in london and waking up in new york , yiu would need to to a format and install every thing ,but haveing said that it can hurt to try it dont be surprised to get driver probs etc

coral

No, it will have all the incorrect drivers & will give you no end of problems - but you can use the licence from the old PC on the new PC, as you own the licence. You can use the old harddrive as a 2nd harddrive to access the data etc.

Chippy_Minton

Are the drives IDE, SATA or SCSI?

Assuming all IDE, you should be able to connect the old drive to the primary IDE controller and Windows will boot from that. Connect the new drive as a slave and use it for data.

Or, connect the new drive to the primary IDE and create a small boot partition on it containing boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr files. Edit boot.ini and tell it to load Windows from the old drive.

It's really a case of experimenting to see what happens. However, as others have said you may have problems with incorrect drivers, in which case boot into Safe Mode (with Networking) and update drivers etc.