Asus Servers

It is possible to transfer a hard drive to another pc?

I have XP on my old computer and I got this nice server type computer but there is no nothing on it. I bought it at a garage sale. The hard drive was wiped off clean. I was thinking of detaching the hard drive of my old COMPAQ computer to this ASUS one. I was thinking if there would be any problems in the process besides maybe a loss of my personal data? Will it still work? And especially if the activation process has to be done again thinking this is a new computer? THANKS IN ADVANCE!

Hard drives in some/most cases are inter-changeable. The basic example for most people is when they buy a new computer they want to salvage all there data from the old one so what they do is set up the old hard drive as a second one (the slave ) in the new computer. To do this you just have to plug in the hard drive to one of the additional plugs on the IDE cables and set up the jumpers for the second hard drive (a simple plug that goes on the back of the hard drive, there should be a wiring diagram on the actual hard drive itself).

In your case you just want to use your old hard drive's OS to run on the new computer, provided that the new computer has an IDE interface as well. (most computer are on IDE, servers can be different, and newer computers can be on other interfaces. In fact in most cases you should be able to swap the hard drives pretty easily and it should work, you just might have to update some drivers later. One case it may not work is if the computer is considerably older and pre XP in this case you might have trouble with some of the older bios's. You can't hurt anything by putting your old hard drive as the primary(master) in the other it just may not work.

I also disagree with some of the other posts saying that its too much of a drastic change for the drivers to be recognized, I've had this work for me before on other computers. Of course there are situations where it wouldn't work but in most cases I think it will work.

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