Putting old hard-drive in New PC...

[ProperBoPeep]

I am just in process of buying new PC. Current PC is running XP as will the new one. Although the new PC is coming with hard-drive with XP pre-installed, I was wondering the following

1) is it possible just to put current hard-drive in new PC - if so, will it detect different hardware etc??

2)is it better just to transfer date from old hard-drive to new one?? If this is case which is better, cross-over cable or serial transfer?? Or would it better to put old harddrive in new PC as secondary slave, and transfer that way??

Many thanks all!!

[bobjim1705]

You can just plug in the old hard drive into the new computer, just make sure that the computer is set to boot from the new hard drive, instead of the old one.

Things will get iffy if it tries to load from the old hard drive.

Personally, I'd go for installing the hard drive as a secondary slave (or give it it's own IDE channel) and transfer what you need from one drive to another.

[peanut]

If your new computer has a different motherboard than the old one, you will need to reinstall windows after installing the old drive into the new machine. To avoid all of that work, windows has a file and settings transfer wizard made just for this purpose, so you can transfer info from the old machine to the new machine. If you are going to put your old drive in as a slave drive, you may not want to have an operating system on it so you might want to either zero fill or format it so it can be used for storage for pics, music, movies or whatever else you may have. Thats how mine is.

[ProperBoPeep]

Thanks for the advice all.

Sounds all much easier than trying to connect two PC's!!