Question on moving HD

Is it possible to take a perfectly funtioning hard drive from one laptop and put it another without having to reload the OS? For example, if I take the HD out of my 1710 and put it in my wife's 2092, will it work when I turn the system on? Thanks in advance for any info...bill

 

The drive itself should work if it's the same physical interface (PATA or Serial-ATA on both laptops), but the OS may cause problems for two main reasons:

- usually OSes on laptops are OEM versions, ie they are locked to the motherboard they are first activated on. Depending on your luck, you may be able to reactivate your laptop by phone, but strictly you'll be in breach of Microsoft's license terms. If it's a full version you've installed yourself on the first laptop, then you are entitled to move it to another machine and reactivate it. Of course I'm assuming here you are using a legit version of the OS ...
- more problematic is the drivers issue. Although your second laptop will probably start, it may not recognize some of the hardware, and it will need some drivers. So make sure your have all the drivers for the second laptop at hand before you attempt the transfer. Also, unless the two laptops have exactly the same graphic adapter, I would recommand changing your graphic adapter driver to standard VGA BEFORE the transplant, to make sure you can actually see any error message.

Hope this helps... Good luck!

 

It should work make sure both systems are of similar chipsets mainly if their the same brand of processor amd or intel itll boot but youll need to load new drivers and call up microsoft and have them activate it on that computer.

 

You will have driver issues as @Manni stated.

I swapped my current laptop's drive with my Dad's laptop drive..and after we swapped, our laptops used to show BSODs and the touchpad and USBs would stop working intermittently....!! Later realised that my hardrive had the chipset driver for the i940 and my dad's hdd had the chipset driver for the i965, which caused bit of problem, so do keep the driver issues in mind. (Though both HDDs had the volume licensed version of Windows XP SP2 installed)

 

Thanks all. Yes, it's a legit full version Vista Ultimate (32 bit) that I loaded myself when I upgraded the 1710. I eventually will be moving to one of the Montevino platforms and didn't want to keep loading stuff on here if I was going to have to do it all over anyway. Then again, I'll probably go 64 bit so probably a moot point...but I truly do appreciate the responses as knowledge is a good thing!