Old HD

[lexdiamond20]

Im currently building a new PC and was wondering if i could place my old 10 gb HD in it with my new 120 gb HD. The 10 gb has all the info that I would like to keep along with the OS. Or would it just be smart to place only the 120 HD in the new pc? And if I do keep the old HD will this mean that I wont have to reinstall my OS.

[pave_spectre]

Moving a hard drive with an OS from one computer to another usually doesnt work, since the OS will be setup for the specific hardware of the old computer.

If the OS is XP however it can be made to boot by doing a repair installation, and this may also be possible with win2k, but generally you will need to completely reinstall.

Using a small hard drive for the OS is often a good idea as this allows the OS to be seperated from any data you dont want to lose in the event something goes wrong with the OS and you need to reinstall.

[Sylvander]

I would expect you could:
1. Put the old HDD into the new PC. [new = master, old = slave]
2. Use the HDD manufacturer’s utilities’ floppy disk to copy ALL the contents of the old HDD to the new.
3. Remove the old HDD [unless you want to keep it in].
4. Run Windows Setup to repair the installation. This will detect the presence of the new hardware and ADD a new branch to the hardware tree in the registry to cater for the new hardware combination. You may not like this because your registry will have settings to cater for every hardware combination you have ever used [This is normal. It’s how Windows works.]. A new installation on a formatted drive would have no record of the previous hardware. The advantage is that if you put the new HDD in the old PC, the previous hardware would be detected and the OS would work with it quite happily [by using the registry settings that match the detected hardware].
If your existing OS is Windows XP that complicates matters because you’d need to contact Microsoft to tell them about the change in hardware so XP will continue to function.

Remember to have you BIOS Setup configured to “Auto” detect all the drives; then when you move the drives around and change jumpers etc the BIOS will detect the changes and reconfigure the drive settings to suit.

A lot of people quite rightly do not like their registry cluttered with old hardware settings and prefer to back up their data and start fresh with a new installation.
It would be interesting to try it both ways and see what you think of it.