Hard Drive Question

[Jks]

I wanted to know when a hard drive is switched into another computer does it boot up normally. Switching both master and slave, to a different motherboard, cpu, etc.

Will i get a disk boot error, or have to repartion and reformat and lose information on my hard drives?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I've done this several times, and in the end, I just formatted because of all of the errors that came up later. My advice would be to back up and reformat. That has been my experience, but see what others say on here as well...
Tas.

 

[RichUK]

The main problem when swapping HDD's into different PC's, is the Motherboard will most likely have different a chipset .. unless you use the same mobo/chipset. This will result in the OS not loading up.

if this is the case and it is a different Motherboard then you can either clean all of the drivers out of device manager and re-install them when the OS loads up on the new mobo, or you can do a clean install...

The reason being is that the drivers for the current chipset etc will not be complient for the new chipset.

If you intend to clear the drivers what you MUST do is boot from the WindowsXP CD and do a REPAIR install (2nd menu after the EULA, not the "Repair from Recovery Console" option in the first menu). This wipes the device manager, re-detects all devices and re-installs all generic drivers (you need to install the latest drivers yourself afterwards).

It also resets all Windows core files back to the versions on the CD (latest Service Pack and updates will need to be re-installed). You will not lose any apps or data.

hope this helps

RichUK

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Nice info. I'm saving that for later use. Never did get the hang of the repair console.
Tas.

 

[Jks]

yeah dude thanks for the info, i appreciate it

 

[TStep]

I usually get away with going into device manger and uninstalling most of the device drivers, ie: IDE, VGA, USB, NIC, audio, etc. Shut the comp down, swap the drives, restart in new comp, install new drivers, off I go.

 

If you go with a new hdd as well you can always make it the slave and access your info just fine.