Can I just move my HDD over to new system if it has no OS on it?

csegura

Honorable
Jan 5, 2013
1
0
10,510
i had an old dell dim4500, running on windows xp and less than 50gb, I upgraded storage by adding a western digital wd5000aakb hdd (500gb), now bought new system with windows 8 and a native hdd of 2tb. since the old one was just for additional storage, can i just remove it and add it to my new computer for an extra 500gb of storage and to avoid having to back up and trasnfer files? windows says the drive is compatible i just don\'t know if it\'s that simple. i know the issues here are regarding hard drives with the os loaded on them but this is not the case for me. please help clarify.