Vista - Hard drive from one pc straight into another?

Hey guys,

back from holiday

Well, I've just finished my friend's new pc today and I will be using the HDD from his old pc in the new one.

Now I was wondering whether I can just install the old one in the new pc, or whether I should format it to delete everything. There's windows XP on it.. So, can I just take it out of the old one and plug it into the new or not?

Thanks in advance,

Hope you guys had nice Christmas and are preparing for NEWYEAR

(BTW I'll post pics of my new 9800GTX+ soon! what a difference compared to my old 6600...)

Cheers,

Amplid

Thank you Amplid, I had a great Christmas Amplid. I hope you had a great one as well.

Since the new computer will most likely have a different motherboard model, CPU, etc..., it would be best to format the drive and do a clean install instead. This way you will not have any conflicts with it running on the new setup.

Welcome back Amplid

Norm

Welcome back Amplid!

You definitely should be able to plug in the other drive and get the data from it, but that XP install won't boot. If you have another drive with an OS installed already on that new machine, it will read/transfer the data from the old drive but if you had planned to try and get that XP install up & running on the new machine it isn't going to work.
If that's the case you do need to format and install clean.
Good Luck!

Ok, thanks all for enlightning me

Now, if I want to format the drive from the old pc, with XP on it, in order to be able to install VISTAA() and I want to keep the data (there's music mostly on it), which is the best way to do this? Copy all to cd's and then put them back in after Vista install or can I do something with that hard drive only, maybe partition and put the music in there?

Greetings,

Amplid

Hi Amplid,

I would always recommend having a backup of them on something else (ex: CD/DVD) other than a hard drive just to be safe though.

Sure, you could create another partition and place the music there until you finish installing Vista on the other partition.

Ok, thanks again Brink, but I think I can get my hands on an external Hard Drive, so I'll be putting the data on there probably!

Now my friend told me today that last time he ran his antivirus, there were 76 virusses on the pc...

Now I now I'm going to have to get those off obviously, I'm thinking with avast!...
If I can get the virusses off, would it then be safe to load them into another HDD by help of DVD's though, or could there still be some degree of infection..?

The data are music only

Thanks guys,

Amplid

Amplid,

Just accessing the drive could infect your computer. I would run a scan on that drive and your friend's computer from the friend's computer first before letting it touch yours.

That's bad.

Whoa that's prob fastest reply I've ever had..

Yah off course, I was going to do that anyway, didn't make it clear maybe, I'll download avast! on his computer, run it and see whether I got them off. Otherwise too bad for him, should've paid more attention, he'll have to get rid of the old and start from scratch with his 500Gb music collection...

Hi Amplid, welcome back, and happy new year,

Might I suggest you do as you say - install avast and let it do a boot time scan, I would also suggest you download and do full scans with spybot and malwarebytes.

With an unknown entity like this drive and with it's admitted history the Multiple scan is the best way to go