will a Toshiba hard drive work in my Dell inspiron 1420

[crazytim]

Will I.have to reformat the drive

 

[ShadeTreeTech]

You are asking two different questions. I am guessing you are wanting to know if you can move a HDD from your Toshiba laptop to your Dell laptop and not reinstall.

There are a few things against this.
1)Not legal within the terms of use with OEM Microsoft software.
2)The SLP header will recognize that the HDD has moved to another system, and Windows will no longer work. (This may take a while.)
3)Those are completely different hardware. It may not load windows at all. Even if you can get Windows to load, I would imagine you will find that it is very error prone.

You will want to wipe and reinstall Windows on the HDD if you move it.