How to transfer hard drive from Inspiron 1150 to 1100?

I'm an old disabled guy scraping by on Social Security, so I have to depend on hand-me-down computers and electronics (Heck! Hand-me-down everything!)

I'd been using a third-hand Dell Inspiron 1150 for about a year, until the light in the display died. So now I have it hooked up to a monitor on a bedside TV cart (I spend the better part of my days in bed these days due to a circulation disorder). It's literally a pain in the neck to have to keep my head twisted over to the side to see what I'm typing.

I recently received a second-hand refurbished Dell Inspiron 1100 from a kind person via FreeCycleSeattle.

I hate to have to downgrade to a less powerful machine, but the tradeoff is that I'd have a laptop with a working display.

I'd like to avoid having to delete all the software and files on my "new" 1100 (and the probable XP registry can-of-worms that that process would likely leave me with) and then have to reinstall all my software and copy over all my files from my old screen-dead 1150.

And even though I have a Dell XP re-installation CD, I'm not confident enough to try doing a clean install of XP.

So I'd like to try just pulling the hard drive from the 1150 and plugging it into the 1100. In fact I did try doing just that, but I got this error message:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen,
restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive contorllers. Check you hard drive to make sure it is proper configured and terminated.
Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF7AC2528,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)​

So I've swapped the hard drives back to their original computers, and now, here I am, lying in bed, propped up on pillows, with my head twisted to the side, staring at the monitor on the cart, as I type this.

I'd be grateful if someone reading this could point me to a set of instructions for how to move the HD from the 1150 to the 1100.

I tried asking this same question over in the Dell forums, but so far haven't got the answer.

 

I don't think you can hot-swap a drive from a 1150 to a 1100. They're using different platforms/chipsets, and as you've just seen, XP really doesn't like this.

If you don't want to do a re-installation, the next easiest thing to do (if you can) is swap the physical display/assembly, which should be the same. Then you don't need to downgrade either.

Otherwise you could try something like going into safe mode and installing the 1100 drivers there, but I don't know how well that will work or even if you can get into safe mode without BSoD'ing.