Slaveofthebeast

If you build a brand new computer, spare the new hard drive, then put your old one in, which has vista and stuff installed on it, will it boot and be like your old computer software wise?

G|F.E.A.D|Killa

no it will not boot at all. you need to reinstall windows. if you try to boot with it it will just freeze at boot and crash.

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23055 3DMark06

My E8600

5.0Ghz E8600

The Pook

Sometimes it will boot into Windows, but that's about it. The drivers are completely different from one part to another, so they'll be buggy and you'll prolly BSoD a lot.

You'll prolly BSOD during the Windows loading screen.

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xdaseinx

Yes sometimes it will. I put a drive with Vista from a bloodiron with an E2180, on a Maximus Formula with an E8400 and accidentally let it boot to disk and not dvd to install vista. It not only worked. It worked great, though Vista wanted a new key.

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votum

XP had issues with that, the OS would kick you in the face when you installed new hardware like mobos, and likewise with just switching the drive to a whole new computer, I havent actually heard of that happening with vista though

lsclincoln

Its a toss up.
Sometimes they will boot sometimes they wont.
But it will make you reactivate if it does boot.

3XPeriment

Right. In other words, chances of success are VERY slim. I just upgraded mobo, cpu, and gpu, and XP booted fine. But really, that's rare. And EXTREMELY lucky. Plus, I'm waiting for it to BSOD. It's gonna happen, i know...

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Esseff

You'd be better off with a fresh install of windows.

leftkidney

most of the time it will work fine

what you should do is before you take the HD out of the computer and put it into a new one go into Device Manager and delete everything so it is all yellow question marks

then take the HD out and put it into the new computer, when it starts up you will get all these "found new hardware" messages and they will/should be installed correctly

the only one that you might have trouble with is the network driver so have it on a CD somewhere to install first then use windows update to reinstall the new drivers for all the new stuff in there

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