[alexm963]

My friend gave me his old dell and it has a lot better CPU, MB, and video card than my compaq so i want to just swap over my hard drives and disc drives to his tower and use that. Is that going to mess with XP, like will i need to reformat? I only have a compaq disc for xp so i dont think it will work in the dell.

 

[dai]

Re: Swapping towers

windows will need reinstalling and you will run into problems without the windows disk

 

[peterhuang913]

Re: Swapping towers

You will need to reinstall XP or else you risk it crashing because of different hardware.

 

[elf]

Re: Swapping towers

It's worth a shot, but like everyone else has said, you will likely end up having to reinstall windows.

 

[sobeit]

Re: Swapping towers

you will not be able to use the compaq windows os key in the dell computer. It cannot be transfered per the eula.

 

[alexm963]

Re: Swapping towers

ok. Thats what i figured i just wanted to get a confirmation. I was hoping i could just get drivers for all of the new stuff and swap it over. But I talked ot my buddy and he has the dell disk so i should be fine.

 

[peterhuang913]

yea, if he has the disk, then it's fine.

 

[nantax]

Have you formatted your computer already? I have read it somewhere, (can't remember where) that you can swap the hard disk from one computer to the other although I was not able to confirm this myself because I have yet to experience this situation.

Since you are going to format your computer, can you try to boot in safe mode and remove/uninstall the disk drives entries. Also remove the IDE/ATA/ATAPI (if it's possible, again I have no first hand experience on this). Shutdown the computer and transfer it to the other machine.

The guy explained that swapping hard disk wont work if the disk and controller are still there because its tied to the mobo and if you remove it, XP will re-install this on reboot, and that reboot will be in the other computer.

Hoping that you have not yet formatted and will hopefully enlighten us if this method does work or not.

 

[alexm963]

no i havent reformatted yet. I guess i could give it a shot. Although i will need a walkthrough on exactly how to do this as I am not sure exactly what you mean. I will bump this thread when i get the disk and start to do it.

 

[nantax]

From your old computer do this:

• Start -> Run -> type devmgmt.msc and hit Return
• Uninstall the items marked red in the attachment. (If its possible)
• Shutdown and transfer the disk to the new PC.

We are waiting for your kind reply if this one works.