Can someone help me? I'm pretty sure I'm right, but want to check before I go ahead...
I have two desktop PCs. The hard drive in one of them has bit the dust. Am I correct in thinking I can take the hard drive out of the other machine, boot up from CD Drive, format hard drive from there and go ahead and install nice fresh copy of Windows?
Yes, ultimately I only need one of them, and the one with the good hard drive is significantly more outdated than the one with the knackered drive...Thanks for response...will go ahead
Yes, ultimately I only need one of them, and the one with the good hard drive is significantly more outdated than the one with the knackered drive...Thanks for response...will go ahead
You've probably already done this, but make sure you've backed up the stuff you want to keep on the good hard drive. Good luck.
Let me get this right: you want to overwrite all the information on the older machine's hard-drive, having physically installed it into the better machine, but with a newer version of Windows to what was installed on the older hard-drive?
What interface is involved - SATA or IDE? What was the older version of Windows on the working hard-drive? I'm thinking you're doing something like replacing XP which might be on the older but working drive and installing something like Windows 7, which was probably the OS on the knackered drive inside the newer machine. In which case I don't see a problem if the good machine has already worked positively with the OS that's going in.
That is, until you realise the persona of the machine you had will need to be tweaked back into shape!
You've probably already done this, but make sure you've backed up the stuff you want to keep on the good hard drive. Good luck.
Yup, backing up as I type this...
Let me get this right: you want to overwrite all the information on the older machine's hard-drive, having physically installed it into the better machine, but with a newer version of Windows to what was installed on the older hard-drive?
What interface is involved - SATA or IDE? What was the older version of Windows on the working hard-drive? I'm thinking you're doing something like replacing XP which might be on the older but working drive and installing something like Windows 7, which was probably the OS on the knackered drive inside the newer machine. In which case I don't see a problem if the good machine has already worked positively with the OS that's going in.
That is, until you realise the persona of the machine you had will need to be tweaked back into shape!
In order:
It's not about overwriting and so on, it's about taking working hard drive from shite PC and putting it into a half-way decent PC that has a knackered hard drive. OS is the same for both systems (W7)...though old one ran x86 (pretty slowly) and newer one runs x64 due to amount of RAM (and runs it just fine). Of course though I understand that reinstalling OS is necessary but I'm fine with doing that and do it quite regularly anyway....I've just never transferred hard drives and wanted to check that the theory was sound before I took the plunge.
IDE.
And I'm OK with tweaking...W7 easy to tweak....plus the resulting PC will be my daughter's anyway so she can tweak away
I once tried to install Windows 7 32-bit into an IDE machine that previously ran XP 32-bit. It didn't really work for a reason I could never get to the bottom of - I assume it was a hardware incompatibility of some kind.
If the older hard-drive is formatted as NTFS there shouldn't be a problem installing the OS, should there? Let us know how it goes.
You can go ahead and install the drive from the other PC to to PC with the dead drive, if these are both the same platform (SATA or IDE). When you start the Windows installation (7 or 8), you will have the option to wipe the drive clean before proceeding with the fresh installation. Make sure you have all of the data that you want copied from that drive before you remove it from the old computer and install it in the unit with the dead drive.
