Moving a primary Hardrive to another computer, will it work in the New one?

Galeeno

I have a primary hardrive which works well and fast on one computer.

windows was installed on it, on this computer after a re-format..


If i take this hardrive, remove it and plug it into another computer's primary hardrive, (which has no hardrive) then will this hardrive work fine here, as the primary, with windows on as it did on computer 1?

or because the specs of computer 1 and computer 2 are different it wont work?

Computer 1, and 2 are both similar, both dels and very similar specs for memory etc etc.

or will the computer NOT recognise the hardrive, as it had windows installed on another computer?

Johnmcl7

It depends how similar the hardware is, some machines you can get away with it and get into Windows to install any required drivers but on others it may just bluescreen on boot. You'll probably need to re-active the Windows license as well which may or not be straightforward depending on whether it's an OEM license or retail.

John

sebastianj

Without complicating it, I think you should buy a portable hard drive carrier case, may be £20 or so on eBay. put your hard drive in it and connect to computer using usb cable. in your case the hard disk may be 3.5 inch. This way you can use/swap any number of hard drives, and make it portable.
sebastian

_gav_

Basically what Jonmcl7 says. It may work, indeed I have done the very same thing, moved from one Dell to another. The system booted up fine but was running Windows 7. You don't say what operating system you are running. Windows 7 is very much more forgiving than Windows XP.

Give it a whirl, it will either work or not, you'll soon find out! :-)