Upgrade using a DELL?

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aaa

I have a friend that wants to upgrade to a DELL, but he wants to
replace the HD in the new DELL with his old HD in order to keeps a lot
of his prior work.

Any problems here? That is - a DELL is not proprietary enough to not
allow that is it?

Thanks You
 
Why a Dell? Why not choose a computer with an Athlon 64 instead?
As for his old hard drive, it makes more sense to add it to a new
system as a second drive rather than as a replacement drive.
I assume you are talking about a desktop pc, and not a notebook.
 
I have a friend that wants to upgrade to a DELL, but he wants to
replace the HD in the new DELL with his old HD in order to keeps a lot
of his prior work.

Any problems here? That is - a DELL is not proprietary enough to not
allow that is it?

Thanks You
Click to expand...

He won't necessarily be able to just install the old drive
in place of the new and boot to it to run the (old?) OS. If
the old OS is old enough, like Win98/SE/ME, it would just
plug-n-play the hardware to a certain extent, and if drivers
are provided too, work, but Win2K or XP usually need a
repair install or other more advanced changes like reverting
to standard IDE controller to get it to finish booting at
all so it could plug-n-play the new hardware.

Connect old drive in addition to new drive, leaving new
drive in same IDE cable/position, and after OS has booted,
either copy data off of old drive to a folder on new drive,
or leave old drive (both drives) in the system.
 
I agree all the way - I guess my real question is whether a DELL (or
for that matter a GATEWAY or COMPAQ) will boot up and start Windows
from another Hard Drive. In other words, would DELL have changed the
MOBO to only work with their modified OS?

Thanks
 
I agree all the way - I guess my real question is whether a DELL (or
for that matter a GATEWAY or COMPAQ) will boot up and start Windows
from another Hard Drive. In other words, would DELL have changed the
MOBO to only work with their modified OS?
Click to expand...

No, Dell does not change the mobo and their "modified OS" is
pretty much normal except they add some customization that
has nothing to do with booting or adding a hard drive.

Whether the Dell will boot up from a hard drive with an OS
installed to it while it was in another computer, depends on
that OS, not on it being an OEM box like Dell, GW, Compaq.

YOu seem to be asking a generic question instead of
providing specifics, so a generic answer is all that can be
provided... you dont' mention the exact goal here, since
there are a dozen ways to get data from one drive to another
or make it accessible to the new box.

If the old box works, the easiest thing would be just
networking them, adding a nic to either as needed, then you
still have ability to comm. between them too.
 
If you use a harddrive from one computer with XP on it in another computer
with a different motherboard, as he seems to want to do, then you MUST
reformat the harddrive and do a fresh install of the OS. Otherwise you will
get ongoing nasty Registry errors.
In other words, No.
 
If you use a harddrive from one computer with XP on it in another computer
with a different motherboard, as he seems to want to do, then you MUST
reformat the harddrive and do a fresh install of the OS. Otherwise you will
get ongoing nasty Registry errors.
In other words, No.
Click to expand...


Really?
I have, and no ongoing nasty Registry errors.
 
kony:


You were lucky.
Click to expand...

How many times do i need to do it to make it more than luck?

I suppose one of these days I'll have to write a guide for
it, but apathy has kept me from it.
 
kony:


You'll only have to fail once and you'll realize how lucky you were
previously.
Click to expand...

Perhaps, or it could be that having it fail is an
opportunity to see what went wrong and change the migration
prep accordingly.
 
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