Can I switch hard drives?

P

paddy

New Member
Hi. At the moment I have a two year old Dell Inspiron 6400 running on Vista and I am thinking about buying a new Dell Studio 17. If I do buy it can I take my 500GB Hard drive with all of my files and the OS on it from my old laptop and switch it with the hard drive in the new one? The new laptop will be running on Vista SP1 if that matters. Will i need to install new drivers and shit?
 
With it being a totally different laptop your best bet would be to backup any data you need saved and do a fresh install since the hardware is all different on the laptop. You can try doing a repair install but I would do a fresh install.
 
Just moving the drive rarely works because it's a different motherboard, that introduces several problems, like johnb35 said, backup your data and do a fresh install, always

To move data around you could buy a cheap ethernet cord and setup both computers for filesharing and move the data you need around
 
I just did a HDD transfer from one computer to the other. One was even 64-bit, and now
it's running on 32-bit. It worked right away - it just had to install all the plug-and-play
devices that it found.
 
johnb35 said:
With it being a totally different laptop your best bet would be to backup any data you need saved and do a fresh install since the hardware is all different on the laptop. You can try doing a repair install but I would do a fresh install.
Click to expand...


that is true

good luck
 
Euklid said:
I just did a HDD transfer from one computer to the other. One was even 64-bit, and now
it's running on 32-bit. It worked right away - it just had to install all the plug-and-play
devices that it found.
Click to expand...

Then you're lucky, for me it's ranged from running slowly and not working properly to Windows not even booting

64 to 32 doesnt mean anything, a modern system can run either
 
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