Can I do this?

[Modular]

I'm picking up an older Athlon XP system for cheap on Saturday. The problem is that the current HDD (we'll call it HDD 1) in it has a virus that I'd rather not deal with. So instead of even formatting HDD 1, I figured I bring along an old HDD (HDD 2) I have laying around that has XP Home installed on it. HDD2 was in a completely different system obviously. I want to install HDD 2 in the new system just to check hardware integrity and so forth. From there I will be doing a fresh install of Windows XP Pro on another HDD (HDD 3) (that I won't have access to until Monday).

So my question is this: Will this work? I'm betting that it won't because the drivers and everything installed on HDD 2 are from another computer, so they won't interact properly with the new computers hardware.

What do you all think?

 

[Arkaign]

do this, and no problemo

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082/en-us

 

[imported_OrSin]

You should a have no problem with the hard drive us you do booted the old computer which it sounds like you did not.

XP is plug and pla so even if the hard ward is different it will just find the enw stuff and make the changes. It might take a few reboots but it worked for me any times.
The biggest problem might be the video cards and if the you have problems with that then boot in safe mode and remove all video card drives.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: OrSin
You should a have no problem with the hard drive us you do booted the old computer which it sounds like you did not.

XP is plug and pla so even if the hard ward is different it will just find the enw stuff and make the changes. It might take a few reboots but it worked for me any times.
The biggest problem might be the video cards and if the you have problems with that then boot in safe mode and remove all video card drives.

This couldn't be more inaccurate. XP is a PnP-compliant OS, but after the install completes, the OS customizes to the chipset and drive controllers present, and moving the drive post-install to another system very often results in stop errors and boot cycling. The mergeide treatment in that KB is the best way to avoid this that I've found, short of a repair install which takes 50x longer.

 

[Jiggz]

I've seen this happened before and most of the time, the system just hangs and will not boot because the HAL file does not match the physical hardware. If you have a Win XP Home Installation Disc why don't you just clean slate hdd1 and do a fresh install? Virus? repartition and reformat! If you're worried about drivers, then you will have the same problem by replacing hdd1 with hdd2 with OS already installed, for it will also look for drivers to update its HAL file.

 

[Modular]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
If you have a Win XP Home Installation Disc why don't you just clean slate hdd1 and do a fresh install? Virus? repartition and reformat!

I'm trying to avoid that because the seller has a bunch of music on the drive that he wants to try and save before I nuke it. I guess the first step is going to be getting the seller to buy a drive to backup the music too. Then I can just nuke the drive. Problem is, when he backs that music up, he could be backing up the virus as well. Not good.

 

[corkyg]

Arkaign has it quite accurately. Major changes in things like chipset, mobo, etc. usually result in a BSOD.

The virus possibility in the music is not a biggie. Copy the music files to an external HDD - run a good AV scrub. Music files are not executable, so the risk goes down. Cleansing should be easy.

Then nuke the system and do a fresh install as was suggested.

 

[Modular]

So there's no significant risk of infecting the slaved drive, so long as it is clean and only gets the music files, right? I always assumed that a drive that is slaved to a drive with a virus could also get infected. I don't know why I thought that, it just seems to make sense.