Safety Question

[CKPhil]

Okay, so I decided last night to reformat my hard drive. Everything went smoothly until I had to enter in my WinXP Product Key. I had the sticker placed in my box of cdkeys, but when I had to actually pull it out... It was gone. So now I have to use my old hard drive to hopefully retrieve my cdkey. Problem is the hard drive hasn't been used in maybe a year and I'm unsure of its condition. So my question is, will running this hard drive harm my PC? If this hard drive is dead from say a static discharge, is there any way that this 'discharge' will effect my PC? Will there also be any problems if the software stored on the hard drive differ from my PC's?

Thanks in advance

 

[MustISO]

It should not hurt your PC to put in a bad HD. At least I've never heard of anything like that.

 

[CKPhil]

Alright, thanks for the fast response! I'll try this in a bit, I really want to get back to WAR.

 

[FP]

Unless of course it has viruses on it which propagate to your current drives.

 

[CKPhil]

Same question, but instead I wanna test my old motherboard*, RAM and a VGA**.

*By test I mean putting in my current CPU/VGA/RAM(all compatible), would I be in any risk if my old motherboard isn't working properly?

**I wanted to test my RAM and VGA on my current PC and again I want to know what risks I will be taking. (My current VGA isn't working properly. So I would like to switch out my x1900xt for my 7800gt. And at the same time add my old rigs RAM to my current.)

Thanks in advanced!

P.S.
I've actually searched around for these questions and came up with nothing. I may have used the wrong phrases when I did search, so I apologize if there is a topic about testing possibly faulty equipment.

 

[mpilchfamily]

The only item that would or could effect all others in the system if it was possibly defective would be the PSU.

 

[Roguestar]

You're good to go. If they don't work, they'll just not work, they won't be able to store up charge and unleash it on the next helpless component you install them into.

The only obvious exception to this is as pointed out by mpilchfamily above, if you use a dodgy PSU it could zap other parts but there's no way a failed hard drive or video card would break a motherboard.