Can i take a hard drive out of a dell laptop and put it into a toshiba laptop

[mchayes]

I happen to have a dell hard drive 250G from a "dropped broken fairly new dell" laptop and a Toshiba a305d 6848 that the hard drive failed in (mechanically)
can I use the hard drive out of the dell, and use the recover disks from the Toshiba to either reformat or wipe and then load windows vista etc from the recovery disks onto the dell drive? After that I want to upgrade to Windows 7, soooooo would I do that in place of using the Toshiba recovery disks?
MChayes

 

[besus]

Yeah you should be able to use the hard drive (so long as they're both SATA or IDE). Obviously you can't use a SATA on an IDE and vice versa.

For the prupose of installing Windows 7, start with that. No need to run the recovery discs really. Unless you wanted to do an Upgrade install so drivers would be in place (which you'd probably want to upgrade anyway). Clean install is always best anyway, especially if there are predetermined partition sizes the recovery discs will assign.

Just install Windows 7 and get the drivers for the laptop from the manufacturers web site.

 

[mchayes]

Kool, yeah both sata, and I have tried the recovery disks which has a "erase" feature on it but after 12 hours it gave me an error message soooo, I will get the W7 upgrade and try that.