Can I go from hard drive to hard drive without losing files?

Question

This is probably a very stupid question...but it shows you how much I don't know about computers.

About a year ago, I had a problem with my laptop.  It would not boot up after I had accidentally dropped it.  I figured that I had cracked the hard drive so I bought a new one.  I installed the new one and everything's good.  

Now, I wanted to check to see if the old one might work because something tells me that I was doing something wrong.  Will it cause a problem if I take out my existing hard drive, replace it with the old one to see if it works, and then put this one back in?  Will I lose any information or files?  

I don't know if it's gonna be put back in clean slate or if it will still have all the stuff I had on there before.  I feel like an idiot now...this is probably a really dumb question.

John T · Answer

You wouldn't lose any information because the hard drive stores information for the computer to run, the CPU and chipsets and all that go to the hard drive to get the information so if you can switch out the internal hard drives, do it. It would work the same as a flash drive/external hard drive, just the hassle and time of taking the computer apart and installing the HD. Hook it up and it should be good to go. 

The only problem with it is if the hard drive is actually damaged or not.

geyer · Answer

attempt utilising a record restoration application to recuperate any data until now doing a format. A format would possibly no longer overwrite the techniques, even though it may certainly flag the disk area as loose (that could bring about documents loss if overwritten).

Rose du fantôme · Answer

one word: wisegeek.com

(okay, so it's more than one, but the website is still useful).

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Can I go from hard drive to hard drive without losing files?

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