Moving a Hard Drive to another PC?

yes unless the os install is corrupted already you can just move it and it should boot up however this could cause it to become corrupted and yes you will have to reinstall or ge new drivers as simply doing a windows repair wont necessarily do everything you need to do. you will want to remove the driver entries and might even want to do it manually thru the registry editor for best chance of lasting stability. the installed programs will stay intact unless something has changed like an additonal drive, or the cd drive has changed. other than that the installed programs will have been setup according to the old setup so things like games in particular might have to be reconfigured due to a different video card. also the new board might not have usb 2 and things like this youll have to consider as well as printer and scanner addresses if using parallel or serial ports for them. if the boards and hardware setup are similar it will give you your best chance at a stable system. now even though i have done this many a many times i have only done this when necessary. as eventually you will have problems although xp is the system i would trust to handle it more than its anscestors and a fresh new install is truly recommended and reinstallation of the software is best. additionally i would backup any important files as soon as yuou can o nthe new board because as i stated earlier its very likely there will be corruption in the os. again this depends on how much stuff you have on their which is directly proportional to the amount of problems you might have now and later. so if the install is pretty clean and runs good with only so many programs install etc then youll have better success. if your os is loaded and filled with spyware toolbars programs games data files movies music and oh so much more and doesnt run the best it should then your looking at trouble

hope this helps and this is my experience with over 12 years as a store owning technician

and to address the cd key issue, microsoft is usually happy to just get you activated rather it be oem or not if you get them on the phone option when activating as i have transfered hundreds of systems for customers since w2k when it started. additionally the cd key is not relative here as you can reinstall on the new system and the software doenst know any better, its when you connect to thier database is when they find out that key is on a new system

Before you remove your hard drive, backup your data into a safe place outside the hard disk.

Put the hard disk in the new computer and start the computer. It will prompt you with so many found driver that need be installed. Ignore the ones it cannot install and let it boot completely.

Beging to reload all the drivers using the installation disk supplied with the computer. You may have to boot the computer in safe mode if the vedio driver will not load at bootup.

Another way is to perform windows repair but avoid formatting the disk. Which ever way you go, you will need to reinstall the drivers.

No, that will not work, its not about repairing anything.

The reason why it fails is not because of technical limitations, but legally, all OEM version of Windows are only allowed to be installed on one particular system, and the license stays with that system

If you have a retail version, then yes you can transfer the license to the new PC, you will have to reinstall though if I'm not mistaken.

But if its an OEM version, there's nothing you can do. Even if you reinstall, your key activation will not work.

Its not about performing a windows repair. Its about the essential drivers which windows uses, like chipset, audio, graphics..... In my personal expereince, if you try to move the hard disk from an intel machine to an AMD, its just gets to BSoD (Blue screen of death). I think it may be coz of the difference in the architecture. if its the same kind of processor, then you might be able to boot with low graphics, no audio/LAN and onboard devices support (assuming a different motherboard)

For an optimal performance, i would recommend an fresh installation of windows, if you are planning to boot from a different machine.

- Regards, James

no it will not work.

if it were windows vista or windows 7 it would.

my advice is to either do what the previous users said, or backing up all the files and doing a clean install with the windows disk. It will give you a fresh start and probably run faster than the one you salvaged..

if its from a custom pc going to a mass produced pc it may or may not work. if have done this several times but most of the time it does not work at all and you end up having to do a fresh install of windows on the hard drive.

the windows repair will not allow you to do this because of the updates this makes it newer than the install disk. Save all your stuff on a cd and reformat and install windows than transfer your stuff.