Old PC HDD into new PC Question (Please help)

Hi, so first off, I am not very skilled with computers or hardware so I thought I'd come here and ask this question to see if someone could help me out.

Basically, I have had an old desktop pc for 8 years with Windows XP installed on C, along with many programs. I just purchased a new computer build with Windows 7 and was wondering if I would be able to just take the HDD's out of the old desktop and put them into the new one without any problems.

Would the fact that I have Windows XP on the old C drive interfere with my Windows 7 boot on the new desktop's C drive?

Sorry, if this isn't too clear, I don't really know how to explain it too well. Please help me out if you are reading this.

I will appreciate it greatly!!

 

What type of interface do the old drives have? I can't remember when SATA drives started coming out, but most drives back then would have been IDE (aka PATA). Pretty much all new PCs will have SATA drives, and your new computer may not even have any IDE ports.

If the motherboard in your new computer supports the interface of the old drives you're good to go. If not, you could look for an add-on interface card to attach the old drives.

Having an installation of Windows on the old drive will not interfere with the Win 7 on the new boot drive.

 

Thank you so much. I am pretty sure actually that my motherboard supports them so I will just take them out and put them into the new desktop's tower. All the programs will still work right? Like Outlook and everything?

 

Err, maybe. Many programs have all sorts of info stored in the Windows registry and will have to be reinstalled. You may get lucky and just have to point the programs to the new locations of their files, but you'll have to try them to find out. You should have no problem accessing your data though.

 

Okay cool thank you so much!

 

I still do not know what your goal is. Are you intending to actually run windows xp programs on the windows 7 computer, with the old harddrive installed as a second drive.

The answer is no, it will not work.

Windows installs programs with files and settings in multiple places--some very old programs contained all their configuration settings and support files in the same directory, but those are rare today.

Are you actually intending to run XP and Windows 7 in a dual boot? That will not work. When Windows 2000 and after were installed they were installed to a very specific set of hardware. Change the hardware and it will not start (and that does not even address activation issues).

Are you simply trying to move your data? That will work.

 

Ok, first off, to the original post - YES, IT WILL INTERFERE, but hopefully not dramatically. Your new computer will just see extra drive, and you'll get the extra drive appear in My Computer, so you can just access all the data on it. However, computers usually put drive letters to hard disks first, so where you probably had C for Windows 7 and D for your DVD drive, you may now have C for Windows 7, D for Windows XP and E for your DVD drive.

This does not happen if you put your old drive in a USB enclosure, and connect that way. This is the preferred method anyway, since when you have your data off, you can wipe the old drive and use it as a backup drive. USB enclosures are very cheap.

If you want to actually run the programs on the drive, or run XP on your new machine, that's where it gets complicated.

Outlook will not run.
Most of MS Office will not run.

Many programs that are not made by Microsoft will run with a bit of effort, but it's much better to install them properly. If you're really stuck you can start copying DLL files around, and that may solve many of the issues, but that's not something I'll go into in this post.

You will have issues accessing data from Outlook, because half the battle is finding it. Unlike most other programs, Outlook does not ask you where to store the data, so you need to go find your "pst" file, which will be in a hidden folder.
It will most likely be here...
??:\Documents and Settings\[your-username]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
..where ?? is whatever drive letter you get for your XP drive (probably D) and [your-username] is whatever username you had on XP.

 

I'm typing this on a HP DC7700 with drives C (SSD) and D (DVD) on the SATA bus, with a really old IDE Seagate attached with an add-on card as drive E (the DC7700 doesn't have a built-in IDE controller). I didn't rearrange the order, this is just how they showed up.

The IDE drive used to have a Windows installation on it, but I wiped that to recover some space. I only wanted to keep my data files.

 

You used an add-on IDE card rather than the mobo, so that's what I'd expect to see.
OP has already said there appears to be IDE on the mobo, so it's more likely the DVD drive will shift letters. The OS can override this of course. My DVD drive is drive W, and my external USB drive is drive X.

 

The bottom line is that you probably don't want to put an 8 year old drive in a new computer. It will be SLOW if you try to make it your main drive that has windows on it. Get a 120GB Vertex 3 Solid State Drive, you won't regret it. If your on a budget a 80GB Intel X25-m G2 is very cheap and reliable, on Ebay.


Trying to just put the old drive in the computer and booting it up will probably not work. You will probably get a blue screen of death because of driver conflicts, because your new computer uses all new hardware than your old one. You'd have to do a reinstallation of windows most likely.

You might want to use that old drive as a second drive in your computer for storage. You would probably want to copy off important stuff that you want to keep and then reformat it so it's blank.