Using an old hard drive on new system

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timmyt38

Commendable
Aug 16, 2016
7
0
1,510
Hey,
I'm starting this budget build and i plan to use my old hard drive as primary storage and as the source for the OS.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/CN6j2R
The hard drive is a 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM
It is from a old prebuilt LG computer.
Can i use this hard drive and have everything there when it boots up or do i have to buy another one and also buy another OS?
 
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The only issue I can imagine you might run into is the physical size of the hard drive itself. Figure out the dimensions of the HD and see if it fits inside the drive bays of your case. It's important that HDs are securely fastened to its case because any unexpected bumps to the tower while the needle is writing could lead to corrupted data, especially if the HD is as old as I think it is.

Other than that your HD should be fine for what you're trying to do. SATA is the standard and will be the standard for a while for internal data transferring, even if it's only 3.0Gb/s in your case.

MORE:
Also, is the OS you are using a 32-bit or 64-bit system? That matters since 32-bit windows operating systems can only detect 3GBs of RAM. I...
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Dead Pumpkin

Commendable
Aug 16, 2016
8
0
1,520
The only issue I can imagine you might run into is the physical size of the hard drive itself. Figure out the dimensions of the HD and see if it fits inside the drive bays of your case. It's important that HDs are securely fastened to its case because any unexpected bumps to the tower while the needle is writing could lead to corrupted data, especially if the HD is as old as I think it is.

Other than that your HD should be fine for what you're trying to do. SATA is the standard and will be the standard for a while for internal data transferring, even if it's only 3.0Gb/s in your case.

MORE:
Also, is the OS you are using a 32-bit or 64-bit system? That matters since 32-bit windows operating systems can only detect 3GBs of RAM. I see that you are using one stick of DDR3 RAM with 4GBs.
 
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Solution
D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

Judicious
Jul 30, 2014
6,633
3
35,960
Hi there timmyt38,

As both are desktop systems, then you should be able to reuse the drive.
As for the OS, you will need to perform a clean OS installation. This means that you need to back up all the data that you need before moving the drive to the other machine.

Do you have a OS CD? In case you do, you should just plug the CD into the new system, boot from it and perform the installation.
In case you don't have(if it is an OEM OS), then I believe you will need to buy OS as well.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD :)
 
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