My local computer store tells me that one cannot simply take a hard drive from a old Pc and place it in a new PC even if you have a Windows license disc for the new PC. Is this correct?
Unless you install it in a computer that has the exact same hardware (Motherboard, Video, Ect.) yes this is true. 9 out of 10 times the system will crash because you are trying to load drivers for hardware that is not present.. 73 Rick N2AMG From: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com [mailto:digitalra...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew O'Brien Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 6:38 PM To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com Subject: [digitalradio] Zapped PCs, data recovery, and Windows ! After years or running PC's without issues, I have had 4 go bad in 12 months. Two this week, 4 days apart via thunderstorms . One went today just an hour after I had fully reinstalled ham equipment on a new PC that arrived yesterday. The new one survived, I had unplugged it at the sound of thunder. I powered off the older one but forgot to remove the power cord, it got zapped. I put in a spare power supply that i had, that lasted 5 minutes and gave up the ghost. Maybe something else was weakened by the original zap and caused the second power supply to burn out. Anyway, my main issue is the frustrating fact that I have data on hard drives that seems ridiculously complex to retrieve when using Windows based PCs. My local computer store tells me that one cannot simply take a hard drive from a old Pc and place it in a new PC even if you have a Windows license disc for the new PC. Is this correct? In the past I have taken old drives and installed them in different PC's as slave drives. However this causes one to have to re-install many programs because they were originally installed to the registry on a C-drive. So what do I do with 5 hard drives laying around the shack ? In particular one two-drive system with 160 gigs of useful data on it (both have Windows OS on them since both are from different original PC systems!) . It would be nice to install in to a PC without having to get a HD with an OS on it. -- Andy
