Adding a Hard Drive w/ OS to a PC that already has an OS

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J

_jt20_

Commendable
Dec 8, 2016
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I have a good, working HDD (call it Fred) from a failed PC. It has Windows 7 on it and tons of data.

I have another custom build PC (call it Samantha) with SSD and HDD with Windows 10 on the SSD.


Can I simply plug Fred into Samantha (Fred is SATA) and access the files without issues from the OS on there? -Without doing any formatting beforehand.

Thank you so much, smart people!
 
Solution
Solandri
Booting a hard drive from another computer rarely works. In my experience it has worked about 1 in 10 times, and when it does work the OS is extremely slow and flaky due to having the wrong device drivers or missing device drivers for the new hardware. Windows has some generic drivers it can fall back on, and sometimes these are enough to boot the drive on a different computer, but at a huge speed penalty.

If you must boot from the drive (e.g. you want to retrieve info or configurations which were only available within a program running on that computer), I would suggest trying to convert the drive into a virtual machine. It's a lot easier if the drive is still in the original computer and the computer still runs. But there are...
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J

_jt20_

Commendable
Dec 8, 2016
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1,510
thanks dudio. good to hear.


Colecovsion. damn that was fun. Had a working one about 10 years ago and it was more reliable than any NES I ever had!
 
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B

BadAsAl

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Oct 13, 2009
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It might be possible, there are variables that might cause it to not boot. You can try it. I recommend unplugging the other drives when you try it just so you don't somehow mess up the boot settings. I'm probably overly cautious. Once you have the drive plugged in, boot into the boot options (F12 normally) and select the drive to boot from. If it bluescreens then you probably won't be able to boot it off your machine (especially if you have an Intel system and the drive came from a AMD system or vice versa).

But if you never intend to use it to boot from, then you can safely delete the Windows stuff from the drive and reclaim the space, although frankly, if you don't need the space I'd leave it alone.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Booting a hard drive from another computer rarely works. In my experience it has worked about 1 in 10 times, and when it does work the OS is extremely slow and flaky due to having the wrong device drivers or missing device drivers for the new hardware. Windows has some generic drivers it can fall back on, and sometimes these are enough to boot the drive on a different computer, but at a huge speed penalty.

If you must boot from the drive (e.g. you want to retrieve info or configurations which were only available within a program running on that computer), I would suggest trying to convert the drive into a virtual machine. It's a lot easier if the drive is still in the original computer and the computer still runs. But there are utilities which are supposed to work with a bare drive. (I'm not recommending any of these - they're just the first ones which came up in a search.)

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/features/convert-physical-to-virtual.htm
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter.html
https://hyperv.veeam.com/blog/how-to-convert-physical-machine-hyper-v-virtual-machine-disk2vhd/

Once you've done that, you can use VMWare Player, VirtualBox, or Microsoft Hyper-V to run the virtual machine. The conversion process takes care of getting the right device drivers installed for the virtual hardware.
 
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