HDD transfer question

[Haervii]

Would it more or less "work" to transfer a Hard drive with Windows 98 on to a new computer? Would that more or lesss plug and play? I've never done it before, so for anyone is so incredibly kind enough to answer, don't presume I know a whole lot about Hard drives.

 

[Haervii]

bump

 

[2confused]

a

 

[Lord Evermore]

If you mean you're building a new computer and want to just use your current hard drive and installation of Windows and applications (instead of a full reinstall) then it's not a very hard thing to do, and it's much faster than reinstalling.

First make sure you have the installation disks for all your hardware. Or at least have unzipped copies of the newest drivers downloaded from the manufacturers' sites (make sure they're uncompressed and in their own directories, so that you can find them during the first bootup). All you need to do is boot into safe mode, go to the Device Manager, and delete every item in it (unfortunately that's a one by one thing you have to do).

Then shut down, swap the hard drive into the new system along with any hardware you're migrating, and boot. Windows will detect your motherboard and all your hardware as if you've done a new installation.

You have to be somewhat logical about the hardware though. If you've got say...SCSI CD-ROM's, then make sure your drivers are all on the hard drive, not on CD, since you won't have access to the CD until the SCSI card drivers get installed.

Doing it this way isn't the absolute best way, but it works fine most of the time. The only possible issue is that there could be leftover drivers from the old setup, but most of the time it won't be a problem.

 

[Haervii]

That sounds kinda messy, but i think I could do it. Is there any risk involved?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Anytime you're doing major work like that, you want to have your entire system backed up. At the very least you should backup your data files and any system software that you'd need to even get the computer up and running in case of a problem.

However in general there really isn't anything that can go wrong. Since you're only causing the system to detect the new hardware, all that's happening is driver installation. All of your software settings and files remain untouched. But there's always the chance of a driver conflict or that one just plain won't work with your system, which might mean you'd have to completely reinstall. I have yet to have that bad a problem though. At the very least you'll be able to get into a low level installation (not quite safe-mode, but without full drivers for video and everything), and from there you can work out what the problem is.

Doing it this way isn't really messy or complicated. And it's much much faster than formatting and doing a complete reinstall of Windows, reinstalling all your applications, then downloading and installing all of the patches and upgrades you already had.