Can I put my old HD in a new rig?

[conjude]

Hi all,

Just a quick question.

Can I take my old hard drive from my self built rig and put in the new rig i'm building. (new mobo,graphic card, memor, cpu)

(Windows XP Pro with SP2)

I want to reformat it but I don't know if I should do it before I put in my new rig or after.

The hard drive is only 1 year old and I dont wanna buy a new one or another OS.

Thanks,

Conjude

 

[grieve]

You will have to format, before or after you move the HDD, iether will work just fine.

 

[grieve]

If your just going to use the old drive as a storage unit then might as well just install and format from within windows.

If you plan to use as the Boot Disk then you will have to format.

 

[grieve]

conjude... what type of connection does the olf HDD have? itll be usuable pretty much no matter what it is, but SATA be real easy

 

[conjude]

So is this the right order?

1. build new rig

2. put in old hdd

3. boot from the install disk

not sure?

Conjude

 

[praeses]

If you are moving to your boot drive to a new chipset or storage controller I would highly recommend running sysprep before moving it. Alternatively you can try doing a repair (not recovery console) from your Windows CD.

For home usage its usually not worth the headaches it can cause. Reformatting is better in the long run.

 

[Zenthar]

If you don't want to keep what is on the disk, there is no preferred way. The only think you might run into if you don't format first is that it might try to boot from it on your new build if you forget to select the CD as first boot device with Windows installation CD/DVD in it. During windows installation, you can create/delete/format partitions so you can do that then.

 

[conjude]

I think I'm more confused....

I want to do a clean install wipe the drive clean and and use the drive in my new rig. Anyone ever done it with a new mobo,cpu? If so what steps did you take?

Thanks,

Conjude

 

[topper743]

As stated above many ways to do this. After the system is built boot from the windows CD to install. Windows will walk u through it. Remove all old partitions and let window do the long format and disk check. This is if you don't want to save any data from the HD.

 

[Zenthar]

I use the same technique as Topper, I just plug everything in (old and new), boot from the installation CD/DVD, create/delete/wipe my partitions from there then install as normal.