Double HDD, different OS, access one from another?

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Baf88

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Oct 5, 2015
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Hello All,
situation is simple: at work, one of computer (Vista) went south. This station had some delicate networking capabilities, and it will take some money to build again. I was asked if we could put the old HDD on the new desktop (Windows 7) that we are buying and run one from the other (some sort of emulation?); I never heard of anything like this, is it something like this possible? Even if it is possible, will the network capabilities still be available?
Thanks for answers!

Baf
 
Solution
hang-the-9
If you can image the other hard-drive, you can run that image in a virtual machine. Not super easy but you can do it http://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/using-a-physical-hard-drive-with-a-virtualbox-vm.html

So if the drive is working, why not just buy the same computer model as the one that is bad and install the drive in that? And if the drive is the part that went bad, or the operating system on it crashed or something, then trying to boot that drive into anything won't work anyway.
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

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Mar 25, 2010
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If you can image the other hard-drive, you can run that image in a virtual machine. Not super easy but you can do it http://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/using-a-physical-hard-drive-with-a-virtualbox-vm.html

So if the drive is working, why not just buy the same computer model as the one that is bad and install the drive in that? And if the drive is the part that went bad, or the operating system on it crashed or something, then trying to boot that drive into anything won't work anyway.
 
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Baf88

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Oct 5, 2015
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Hi hang-the-9,
thanks for your answer. I will learn more about virtualization, thanks for the link. I didn't buy the same machine because if the HDD is actually the part that broke, I would end up with an older model.
 
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

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Mar 25, 2010
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152,940


Well you would know if the hard drive is the issue by what the computer was doing, and by running a test on it with a utility from the drive vendor. Don't guess about what the issue is without actually testing things, that's how worse issues happen, when people start doing things without knowing what they are doing or why. A good hard drive and data can turn into a bad hard drive and deleted data in 10 seconds if you do something based on bad information.
 
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