So what do I need to know if I want to replace a good (working) hard drive in a Dell with another, actually older hard drive, from an e-machine we no longer use?
They both run XP, and there shouldn’t be anything wrong with either drive.
Can I just unplug one, and plug in the other? Or how dangerous is that?
Why do you want to do this? If all you want are files from the older drive, it is much safer to simply install it in the new machine as either a secondary master or a slave on either the primary or secondary IDE channels. That way, there won’t be any problem with drivers or hardware incompatibility.
Yeah, that works great, I did that at home, but I’m interested in moving the first harddrive to another location, leaving the much better PC (the Dell) where it is, saving the e-machines hard drive and taking a baseball bat to the rest of it.
You mean bringing the entire Windows installation etc from the older machine along, and plugging it into the newer hardware? Not likely to work very well at all, because the older installation of Windows is going to be looking for all the hardware that was present on the older machine. Best case scenario(but very unlikely) is that it would boot, install loads of new drivers as it does so, then expect you to activate that license of Windows again. Worst case scenario (and most likely): it won’t boot past (or even as far as) the Windows splash screen, owing to wrong motherboard drivers.
Damn, well I guess that answers that. I probably shouldn’t even try it.
Thanks for the quick replies!
I got it to work a couple of times but boy is it ugly. You have never heard a computer bitch so much. getting the right drivers in place for the new setup takes a long while.
Nah, go ahead. Worst case scenario is that the older drive is rendered unbootable because of driver incompatibilities (although your files will still be intact) and you have to swap it back to the Dell drive. OTOH, it might work at least well enough for you to get online and get the proper driver sets. I would go to the Dell site and get the drivers for your particular machine and copy them to CD-R before you try the switch so you have them at hand. If you can get it to boot to XP after the switch, use Safe Mode from the F8 boot menu and then open the Device Manager to remove all the installed devices. After you reboot, XP should redetect the hardware and either install or request the disk for the correct drivers. As noted, it’s a huge pain in the ass sometimes, but it’s seldom impossible.
:eek: Sweet, I’m gonna give it a shot. The e-machines XP is from late '02 or early '03, probably not even running SP2.
For the record. I have sucessfully move one IDE drive from an old motherboard to a new mother board when upgrading my computers. I have not had problems. Windows has been good at finding and configuring the new hardware.
I find that it is very handy to have a USB thumb drive and another computer that works and is connected to the internet. This is handy for getting drivers and such.
I recomend booting the E-mach in safe mode, go to device manager and remove ALL hardware, shut down. Then transfer the HD to the Dell and booting.
yeah - cranky would be a severe understatement! It starts to boot, but throws me to the screen that allows the option of booting in safe mode, normally, etc. Won’t get far booting in any scenario before restarting to the said screen above.
I’m probably unqualified to do much more than this.
The e-machine has already been stripped, unfortunately, so it won’t go back there.
Do you have your Windows XP installation CD (I mean a standalone installation, NOT a “recovery disk”)? With the old drive in place, boot with the CD in (you might haqve to press a key when prompted to boot from the CD-ROM) and reinstall Windows. You won’t lose any files, but Setup should detect and install basic drivers for the new hardware. That’s your best hope of getting it to work at this point.
Comcur; I’ve used a method like this for a PC repair that amounted to what you’re doing (because it involved swapping out motherboard, CPU and RAM. It worked just about OK afterwards, but it was always a bit weird and flaky.
If you don’t actually need the files on the drive, you’re better off wiping it and performing a clean install; if you do need the files, you’re better off installing the drive as a slave.
You could also simply delete the Windows folder. That will allow a clean install while still preserving your files. Or you can use one hardrive as a backup for the other, then format. You’ll need to reinstall all of your software and put your settings back the way you want them, but a clean install is your best bet at avoiding any potential problems with a reinstall over a broken installation, as noted above.
Switch to the standard VGA driver before you remove it from the old machine. This will ensure that you can at least boot to the GUI.
/my $.02
Using the WIN install CD to repair the install, in my experence rarely works, and when it does it’s never quite right. At this time your best shot is to transfer any data that you want to save from the E-Mach drive to the Dell drive, using a master/slave set up, then just reinstall Windows.
2 alternatives:
‘Ghost’ your Dell harddrive to the E-m harddrive (Ghost is a name brand product, but basically use a program to recreate what you had on the Dell HD onto the E-M HD, if it will all fit),.
Another thing that comes to mind is you can install Win XP in another directory on the E-M drive and XP will set up a dual boot, one to the ‘broken’ win XP and one to the fresh installed XP, this way all your files are still accessable. This could be combined with a XP repair attempt, where you would try to repair first, then if that really doesn’t work, install a new XP next to the old.
Using this procedure will sometimes allow Windows to cope with a different drive controller. It is not guaranteed but it is better than nothing.
If one were really serious about doing this kind of thing, Acronis True Image Workstation with the Universal Restore add-on will clone a Windows system to different hardware with no problem. It handles all the differences in HAL, drive controllers, etc. A very slick product, though I suspect it retails for more than you are willing to spend on this project ($110).
Hard drives are so cheap now, why are you wanting to suffer like this?
I tried this when I bought a new motherboard, video card and processor and removed the old ones. XP wouldn’t even boot in safe mode. Of course, that was going from a VIA chipset to an Nforce, an ATI AGP video card to an NVIDIA PCI-E and a 32 bit processor to a 64 bit. XP would boot up but would blue screen before I got to the desktop, even in safe mode.
I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled XP from scratch and it worked great, but I still had to phone Microsoft to reactivate Windows. Nobody has really gone into detail about that yet so I’ll warn you: Windows XP can only be used on one computer at a time. If it detects different hardware than what it had the last time it booted up, you’ll have to phone MS to have the software “re-activated” which consists of typing in a ridiculously long number which a polite gentleman in India will give to you… very… slowly… You must tell him the software is only being used on one computer and when he asks why you’re reactivating, tell him the old hardware died and you had to replace it.
Also, if the original machine included Windows as an OEM bundle, you might have problems reactivating it; Microsoft won’t let you transfer an OEM-licensed copy of Windows to a different machine, although if you plead that it isn’t a different machine, you just had to change the motherboard, processor, hard drive and graphics card, they might be persuaded to permit it.