Can I move hard drive from Thinkpad to Latitude E6400?

I've got an old Thinkpad R61i with a Western Digital "Blue" 320gb drive installed in it running Vista Premium. I bought the drive from Zipzoomfly and installed it into the Thinkpad in January in order to bring back some life to the computer. And it worked; it's fast and quiet.

A few weeks ago, I bought a refurb E6400 from the Dell outlet store. It came with a 160gb hard drive installed. It's a nice drive. But as the days tick away, I've been thinking of pulling the 320 from the Thinkpad and installing it into the E6400. I'm mean what the heck, I'll get twice the space, and it's a Western Digital. It's a win win.

My question is this: if I simply replace the 160 with the 320 without doing a clean install of Vista, will the E6400 recognize it and boot up? I do realize that I'll have to install the E6400 specific drivers on top of the old Thinkpad drivers for everything to work correctly.

Keep in mind, the Vista Premium installed on the 320 is a full retail version of Vista that I purchased after-market. It's not a Lenovo branded version of Vista; the R61i originally came with Windows XP installed. So there's no branding conflicts here.

I'd really rather not do a clean install on the 320. I've already done that when I installed it in the R61i. What would be ideal is if I could just throw it in the E6400, and after installing the correct drivers, just go to work. Any advanced techies out there know if this will work?

I appreciate your help!

 

You will almost certainly need to do clean install(s). There's no harm in trying to straight up boot from the 320GB drive (in the best case scenario, you'll just have to reinstall drivers), but generally it's bad idea to roll over an installation like this, and you'll most likely just get a BSoD.

 

Thanks. I appreciate it. I guess I'll throw it in the E6400 and see what happens. I'll report back with my findings for all who might be interested in doing the same.

 

I usually just do a clean install when moving a HDD to a new system. While I have had a transfer with no issues, by and large I have gotten issues from small (just need to get new drivers and a few bugs worked out) to full BSODs on many.

Good luck either way.