question about a harddrive

[sao95]

my old computer died, can i take the Hd out of it and put it in my new tower to get the OS off of it?

[stroyal]

With XP no
2000 not sure
98 Maybe. I had it work once,but it is not worth it. All your drivers are wrong. As you boot up the first time, you get new hardware message after message. Plug and play must miss some things, because you have to chase problems for a few days.

[woodbutcher]

Probably.
What OS are we talking about?
What is the old motherboard?
What is the new mobo?

WB

[John Prophet]

With w98 I have had it work about 75% of the time..what you have to do is boot into safe mode on the new machine (after swapping the old hard drive over).

Then you have to run "regedit" and delete the "hkey local machine/enum" folder. That deletes all the hardware entries and then when you reboot into windows it will begin to discover all the new hardware and you will be prompted for drivers etc.

Usually for me it detects the video card twice and the keyboard twice so I have to then go back into device manager and delete each of those keyboards and each video card and let them be detected again and reinstalled.


As I said, it works sometimes, sometimes no.

JP