Is This A Dumb Idea?

[katana]

Before you remove the disk from your old computer, in Device Manager uninstall all the hardware you can.

I once read one report of someone who did that in Win 98, and when he placed the drive in the new computer it was detected and booted.

Whether that will work on the newer operating systems though remains to be seen.

[Chicog]

assuming you run Windows XP and you have the installed o/s version on a CD (no matter whether legal or not) your chances are excellent that you can use the drive as a boot drive. at first boot windows checks the hardware and if you are very lucky it doesn't even ask for the installation CD but adjusts to the new hardware.

i have done it several times without any problems, recently with my wife's computer because it's a pain in the àss to install all problems again. but as you are getting a tower built hand over the drive to the one who does it and he will solve the problem.

You have been very, very, lucky - I've swapped a CPU in one machine (same make & type, just faster cpu) and been plagued by BSODs and in other computers with more drastic changes I've had numerous faults.

As for your second comment, the OP is asking for recommendations for someone to do the job.

The chances are your motherboard and processor are incompatible, or you need to change some BIOS settings.

Hard disks, on the other hand are nowhere near as fussy. If he wants it as a boot drive, he should take the original drive out, insert the new one in its place and power up.

And if he had Windows 7 on it, it would pretty well find new drivers for most stuff anyway. The only ones you need to start with are video and network, after that you can use Unknown Device Identifier to get drivers for the rest.

The only issue then with replacing the second drive is whether or not it needs to be manually configured as a secondary or if it's done by cable select.

[astral]

I used to do all my sw programme installs on a second partition D:

That way, if I had to re-install Windows, XP in those days, the C: drive was formatted, but not the rest.

I still had to reload all the programmes, but the settings were picked up from the previous

time, making life much easier.

[Lannig]

I used to do all my sw programme installs on a second partition D:

That way, if I had to re-install Windows, XP in those days, the C: drive was formatted, but not the rest.

I still had to reload all the programmes, but the settings were picked up from the previous

time, making life much easier.

Er... are you sure? since Windows 9x most applications store their settings in Windows' registry, which is on disk C:. Only the user part could possibly be on D: if you move your "Documents and Settings" tree there (which I sometimes do for specific reasons). That user part may include part of the settings. Still, the part that is in the system registry on C: is likely to be the most important.

Of course some application still store their settings in .INI files and those will be kept. But not many of them, are there?

[astral]

I used to do all my sw programme installs on a second partition D:

That way, if I had to re-install Windows, XP in those days, the C: drive was formatted, but not the rest.

I still had to reload all the programmes, but the settings were picked up from the previous

time, making life much easier.

Er... are you sure?

Absolutely, worked like a dream for many years.

[JSixpack]

Since you implied having two drives in your new computer, why screw around? The easiest thing to do is to bring an image of your current disk (or system paritition, the image of which could be on a different partition on the disk, or copied back to it from another disk) that you've created using Acronis 2011. And bring along an Acronis recovery CD you've made w/ Acronis Plus Pack. Then using the recovery CD you can just do a "bare metal" restore to your new drive in the new computer. It'll boot right up; install your new drivers: you're done.

[bendejo]

FYI Windows 7 doesn't have the same issues with swapping out the hardware, and if necessary can just do a "repair install".

....

Ahem!

I keep backups of my C: drive with Acronis TrueImage. If something goes wrong I'm able to restore and all is well. If trying out a piece of software I don't like, rather than uninstall, I'll instead restore a recent drive image (keeping my user settings to another partition). Did this lots of times, pretty smooth operation.

Last week I had a catastrophe where my disk's partition table got trashed. I was able to recover my extended partition (over 200Gb). I had to create new primary partitions. Restored my C: drive.

Windows 7 wouldn't boot, it offered the repair install. I have a dedicated pen drive with Windows 7 distribution, booted from that. Didn't work. Said there was a device missing from my computer. Well, it's a laptop, can be assured no hardware was changed.

Spent 2 days with numerous variations of restore, and looking for advice on the internet. I figured someone else may have had this problem before. People on the net were talking about success with Windows 7 recovery, and after a lot of searching I was finally able to download it -- turned out to be the same as the recovery utility on my pen drive, I think.

I gave myself a 48 hour limit, if I couldn't restore it then to hell with it, time for a new Windows installation, which I ended up doing.

I can tell you with certainty the only thing that changed between the crash and the install was the partition table. "Repair install" didn't work for me.

There is something in Win7 where you can back up your drivers, maybe I needed to do that. I hadn't considered it as I thought Acronis TrueImage would take care of everything.

Live and learn.

[JSixpack]

FYI Windows 7 doesn't have the same issues with swapping out the hardware, and if necessary can just do a "repair install".

Wrong. Members, I really, really would not count on that advice.

A couple of examples:

http://www.sevenforu...-installed.html

http://www.daniweb.c.../threads/281576

But of course much easier to keep your data on a separate drive - I do that and just use the extra space on the C: drive to hold big temp/working files, non-essential media can always grab off the net if lost, extra backups of the primary data drive, etc.

Not easier at all. For example then you've got to have yet another drive (secondary data drive?) to backup your (primary?) data drive. And, as you've implied, files get scattered around between two drives and you always have to scroll around more.

But even though you've brought up a serious religious issue, left over from the old Win98 days--and I'm not going to argue religion with our believers; if it makes you feel good, do it--it's irrelevant to the problem at hand.