Installing old hard drive on new laptop

I have an HP G series laptop that I've been told by the repair techs had either it's screen or video card go bad and in either case would be over $360 to repair it. It's not worth the price to me and I'd rather buy a new computer. I want to buy the Dell Inspiron 11z.

My question is this: Is it possible for me to use my old hard drive (from the HP) on the new Dell laptop and still access it, as it was before on the HP, ie same files, same programs, etc?

I unfortunately didn't back anything up on the old HP hard drive and now I don't have access to any of my files.

 

You can purchase one of these

Newegg.com - Vantec 2.5"/3.5"/5.25" SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter - Model CB-ISATAU2

This product allows you to hook up your old hard drive to it then you can hook it up to your new laptop (Dell) and access the files from it. Any product will do (I have this particular model and it works)

 

You can give it a try, if they are both 2.5" SATA.
Meaning, just install your old hard drive in the new computer.
It may or may not boot to windows. If it doesn't, you can use a partitioning program like gparted to separate the old partition and make it smaller, then use the rest of the space to install windows again.

Of course if your old hard drive was only 80gb or something then you probably want to go with the above option.

 

Unless you had a modern OS (Vista/7) it won't boot. You'll be lucky if XP will BSOD. Vista/7 might be unstable BUT it should boot, but it is not recommended. I would follow misfit's advice, buy a cheap enclosure and copy your data over and reinstall your programs.

 

Just in case anyone else is surprised by the whole booting on a different system thing... Its mostly dependent on the chipset. If you have 2 laptops with the same chipset its pretty much guaranteed to work well if you swap the hard drives, assuming they are on the same interface.

 

Thank you for your help, I'm probably just going to get an enclosure and go about it that way. The only reason I was hesitant before was that I had several one time download programs on that computer that were paid for and other programs I had to get help gettin on in the first place in addition to the files I never backed up. Looks like I'll need to be happy I can access my files at least! Thank you all again!

 

Depending on the paid programs, if might be possible to transfer the license. Sometimes contacting customer support does the trick, my sister got her CS2 activated by Adobe like that after explaining the situation at the very least, it's worth a shot. Sometimes they'll be willing to deactivate the key for the old laptop and allow you to reactivate it on the new one or give you a new key.

 

They say either the screen or the graphics card... Have they tried an external display?

Here's my suggestion: enable remote desktop, sysprep and install the HDD in the new machine. Once you've set-up the installation on the new laptop, feel free to clone it to the likely larger hard drive that came with it.

This post might give you an idea on how to proceed for the first part:

Enabling remote desktop from run

There are plenty of guide for the second step, here's one:

IT Professional Technical Resources & Library: Easy Windows 7 Sysprep and Imaging

Good luck,

Darkshado