Can you use a hard drive in another system without reformat??

[briddle]

A friend of mine had a one ghz dell. He was running w2k. He had a great number of programs that his work installed on it. The system died and he moved on to another job and all he has left is the hard drive. I tried the hard drive in three different systems, all amd, but no good results. I do not have any pentium III boards to test on, but all the amd boards come up with a blue screen. He asked me to try and find a board/chip combo around one ghz to get it to work. I do not know all that is installed, but I know he really wants to keep the programs.

Any suggestions on a board/chip to buy??

 

[montag451]

You can do,
but best to reinstall an os, and reinstall proggies.

The hard drive doesnt know that you are using it in a different system. It therefore wants to use the os that is on it to boot up - buttttttt, all the hardware is different = big problem cos the hdd just loads up the drivers like it is being told to = bsod.

there is a workaround -
saw it on anandtech ages ago, but cant find it at the moment.
Deals with deleting large parts of the registry, then just reinstalling drivers.

 

[briddle]

Any suggestions are appreciatted. Dealing with w2k.

Thanks

 

[montag451]

Luckily, in my old dusty library of bookmarks - found this:

http://anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=113

 

[SemperFi]

I am not sure what you are saying. Are you disconnecting your current drive and hooking up your friends and trying to boot off of it. If you are like montag said not going to work drivers are different.

Now if you just want to save some files for him just put the drive in your system and burn them to cd or whatever. Saving programs isn't very practicle though. Install programs always put files in other places usually system32.

Lastly having a pentium 3 board is still no guarantee. It pretty much needs to be using the same chipset as the old board. Anyhow I have 2 suggestions if you are just trying to get the drive to work with a different system. The first is something that I have never done. I have read you can install windows over itself. Basicly straighten out the drivers. I think all installed proggies are alright. The second I have done with mixed results. I have pulled out drives and put in new system successfully. It is a lot of work and no guarantees. I have had a couple work and a couple not work. Anyhow find all of your drivers online and download them and get them on the drive. Especially the ones for the motherboard. If you can get it to boot none of the drivers will be right as stated before. Your cd will be unusable until you get the chipset and ide drivers into the os. If you have the drivers on the hard drive you have greatly increased your chances.

Your best bet is a fresh install of the OS.

 

[briddle]

Thanks for the help, will read the article. It is important to him to have the programs work on the hdd, so I will try.

Thanks