Will HDD out of current PC work ok in new system?

Brian_Pamo

Hi all

I have a PC that has pretty unique software on it. The software itself was very expensive when we bought it. Now, the software is out of its support period and the company want over £300 to give us the latest version which is a waste of money considering that I am happy with the software. So, I have built a new PC and I literally want to take the HDD (that has the software on it) out of the current PC and put it in the new PC however I’m sure I read somewhere years ago that this is not recommended because the HDD somehow knows the hardware of the machine it is/was in and this causes a problem. What I mean to say is can I take a HDD out of a 10 year PC and transplant it into a new PC allowing it to work without any problems or will I encounter problems because the HDD is set up to recognise the hardware (MB, BIOS etc) from the older PC? 

Browntoa

Windows will fail it's authentication due to the changes

Which version of Windows ?

debitcardmayhem

What is the software, can you reload it? What version of windows it is running on. More information needed. Or are you inteding to boot from the. Old hdd

Brian_Pamo

The software is a commercial program that is used widely in our industry. It uses a USB Dongle to ensure it cannot be copied. It is working fine on a windows 10 PC (that was originally windows 7 before we upgraded it) 

Brian_Pamo

There never was installation files. The software was originally installed on 4 PC’s by an employee of the software company who actually visited our place of work. 

HereToday

No reason why not, as long as the hardware is compatible. There might be some tweaking to do. Though I would clone the drive to SSD first in so that I always had a back-up and then work with the clone.

jsmith9

Your problem will be with Windows although this is not insurmountable

 if your windows is an OEM version than that is tied to the original motherboard and if you then put the HDD in a different system then it will fail the verification test

That said it will still run and you will just see a watermark and not be able to do personalisation etc

If your windows is a retail version then that is a lot better in that you can definitely transfer it to your new system - plug the HDD into your new system and see what happens

JohnSwift10

You can but try, I built a new computer and used the hard drive from my old computer and it worked.

st999

Browntoa said:

Windows will fail it's authentication due to the changes

Which version of Windows ?

Not if you have the key.

Brian_Pamo

The new PC software is windows 10. I previously used a piece of free software called Lazesoft to obtain the windows key that was IN THE BIOS. After reinstalling windows 10 I activated the copy of windows with that product code of windows stored in the BIOS. 

HereToday

Brian_Pamo said:

The new PC software is windows 10. I previously used a piece of free software called Lazesoft to obtain the windows key that was IN THE BIOS. After reinstalling windows 10 I activated the copy of windows with that product code of windows stored in the BIOS. 

Likely the new PC utilises UEFI with Secure Boot enabled; so the HDD with it's legacy partition won't boot.

You'll need to change the BIOS settings to legacy in order to get it to boot and then change them back when you want to boot the original Windows 10 drive.