Replacing Dell Dimension 4300 Hard Drive

[RATTY]

I just acquired a Dimension 4300 as a hand-me-down which I would like to network with my Dimension 4550. My 4550 is running Windows XP SP2 and the 4300 has Windows ME. I've heard that ME is very NG and so thought I would upgrade to XP, and then there are many applications to install, all of which takes time.
I recently replaced the hard drive in my 4550 with a 160GB WD drive and have been trying to decide what to do with the old drive which is nearly full but working fine.
The question is...can I replace the drive in the 4300 with the old drive from the 4550?
Is it a simple matter of just removing the old drive and replacing it with the new one?
Both systems are compatible with ATA-100 Ultra DMA drives.
In the Device Manager Control Panel on the 4300 the drive is described as
"generic IDE disk type 55" (40GB)
The drive from the 4550 is a WD400BB IDE drive.
Would I need to update the system BIOS which is currently version A02?

 

[g-paw]

You should be able to just install it and the machine should recognize it. If you're installing XP on the 40GB and it's almost full, I'd put all the data on another drive and do a full format of the 40GB and install XP. You could do an upgrade but if the drive is almost full you may not have room for XP. I always try to make sure at least 20% of my hdd is free but this is probably overkill but I think it should be at least 15% to avoid potential problems.

 

[RATTY]

And here I am thinking I could just pop my old drive with XP, applications and files into the 4300, saving all the time of installing same. I guess life isn't quite as simple as all that. What a shame.

 

[g-paw]

And here I am thinking I could just pop my old drive with XP, applications and files into the 4300, saving all the time of installing same. I guess life isn't quite as simple as all that. What a shame.

I've found that's the problem will reality, it keeps blowing up beautiful theories.