Old Hard drive...

[Sirfredrickrex]

Back again everybody. I posted earlier about how my laptop wen out on me and I was trying to salvage information. Turns out the motherboard was bad, so I went and removed the hard drive and got a SATA wire connection. And after plugging in and removing files I wanted, I was curious now if I could use the hard drive, considering it has the OS that I want, and set my current computer to boot from that hard drive.

Is this something that is viable?

I have also wondered about the possibility of partitioning my current drive so that I could copy my old drive in it's entirety onto my current laptop and then have the option to boot from 2 OS's. Is this something that can be accomplished, and if so; is there anyone out there that might be able to steer me in the right direction?

 

[pete.i]

There is no reason why you couldn't use it theoretically but the software that you have on there was specifically for the laptop that it came out of. Things such as the graphics driver, sound driver, chipset drivers etc will all be for the older computer. As I say in theory you can use it but some things just wouldn't work and why would you want to anyway as, I assume, there is a perfectly functional hard drive and sodftware in your new computer. You could reinstall your old hard drive with your OS of choice and the drivers for the new machine but I cannot see the point. What you can do is wipe it and use it as extra storage for your new machine.

Your second question is possible and in fact a lot of us computer peopel do it. It's called dual booting. It is quite difficult to do though if you are a novice. The problem again comes down to drivers if you still are adamant that you want to use the software and OS on your old drive. The drivers on that drive will not run the hardware of your new computer so dual booting will require a completely new install of that OS.

I hope that is clear although I think it may be confusing LOL. Bottom line is that you cannot do what you want to do as such. I think your old drive software is now defunct. You have taken your personal files off and that is about as good as it gets. Your old drive can be used only as extra storage which aint such a bad thing.