old HDD in new computer?

[boognish]

This may be silly question but I couldnt find an answer anywhere.
Im building a new htpc and i am curious if I simply put the old Hard drive in without reformatting, will it boot up the operating system? I had sage setup pretty well and was hoping to avoid doing it from scratch
thanks in advance

[GKusnick]

It will probably work. There will be a lot of "New hardware detected" messages as Windows installs drivers for you new motherboard, and maybe a few reboot cycles before everything is working. Ideally you should make a backup of your boot drive before trying this just in case something goes wrong.

[Surtr]

It's pretty hit or miss if you just drop in the new motherboard/CPU without uninstalling old drivers, etc. first. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't and even if it does you may experience funky behavior due to driver mismatches, etc.

I used the method described here to upgrade the motherboard/cpu in my sage server and it worked like a champ.

Good luck!

[boognish]

ok thanks for the replies.. im gonna try out hat method you suggested.

[bjterry62]

Using a hard drive with a preinstalled OS is a very bad idea unless the motherboard is exactly the same as the original. Other hardware is not that big of an issue, but when you load Windows on one MB and then try to boot using a completely different MB, there is usually a problem. Typically, it will give some sort of error message at boot up or just hang when loading Windows. I have had it work, temporarily, when switching between two different Biostar MB Models. However, problems and instabilities cropped up later and just never worked out.

A fresh install with the latest drivers for all hardware is always best. Also, start with MB, CPU, RAM, Video and hdd - Do a full format, load Windows and load chipset / video drivers. THEN start to add things like tuners and other PCI cards. If you just stuff all the hardware in the case and start loading things, you have so many "New Hardware" windows popping up you hardly know which driver disc to put in at a given time.

BT

[Surtr]

BT - have you tried the sysprep message? It actually works quite well. Always in the past I had done the full windows reinstallation when upgrading a motherboard but after stumbling across the sysprep method I gave it a shot. Couldn't be happier, took a heck of a lot less time than a full reinstall and I had absolutely zero issues.