Thread: Switching hardrives

  1. #1
    left crog... back when? incognito's Avatar
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    Switching hardrives

    My dad said, I could switch my PC with his......his is superior to mine in every aspect but the fact that it has a smaller hardrive, now my question is........how could I switch both hardrives?

  2. #2
    Code Goddess Prelude's Avatar
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    Open up the casing, unplug the harddrive, slip it out of the slot, slip the other drive in the newly vacated slot, plug it in. Replace the casing, hook up the box, turn it on, pray very hard.

    -Prelude
    My best code is written with the delete key.

  3. #3
    I lurk
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    I'd remove all devices from the device manager of both PC's before swapping Hard Drives.

  4. #4
    left crog... back when? incognito's Avatar
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    hehehe ok let me restate my question......Will the EDIT:: information on them still be intact? And will it still have the previous OS I had installed on the hardrive?
    Last edited by incognito; 02-28-2003 at 11:15 PM.
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    > And will it still have the previous OS I had installed on the hardrive?
    ..Yeah, swapping a hard drive out doesn't destroy data. All of the settings and user files on your dad's hard drive, if you put it into your computer, will then be on your computer, and vica versa. The hard drive of a computer, is where any data is stored. Registry, installed programs, operating system, and if you're using an operating system such as windows xp, then that'll give you a lot of messages when you first plug that thing into whichever computer.
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  6. #6
    left crog... back when? incognito's Avatar
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    What about BIOS and choosing which hardrive it should boot from.....if it's in the same place where the other one was....will this be a problem?
    There are some real morons in this world please do not become one of them, do not become a victim of moronitis. PROGRAMMING IS THE FUTURE...THE FUTURE IS NOW!!!!!!!!!

    "...The only real game I thank in the world is baseball..." --Babe Ruth

    "Life is beautiful"-Don Corleone right before he died.

    "The expert on anything was once a beginner" -Baseball poster I own.


    Left cprog on 1-3-2005. Don't know when I am coming back. Thanks to those who helped me over the years.

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    As long as any BIOS can boot the hard drive, no, it shouldn't be.

    It's just, once you get to the OS stage of booting, that's when swapping out hard drives can be a hassle. For me, it's not, because when I temporarily put a hard drive in my machine(say like, my DOS box's hard drive, to transfer files to it), it's never the boot hard drive. So my OS loads fine(Windows XP Professional). If I were to put a hard drive in this tower that had Windows XP on it, and used it as the boot drive, Windows XP would say, "WOAH!" when it first loaded up. "Where'd all this new and strange hardware come from?" etc.

    -edit-
    I hope formatting isn't a problem for you.

  8. #8
    left crog... back when? incognito's Avatar
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    Well as it stands I have 3 partitions on my hardrive running both XP and Win2k on it. So at booting up I get the choice of chossing which hardrive to boot from......I didn't quite understand your previous post. What do you mean by "OS stage of booting"?
    There are some real morons in this world please do not become one of them, do not become a victim of moronitis. PROGRAMMING IS THE FUTURE...THE FUTURE IS NOW!!!!!!!!!

    "...The only real game I thank in the world is baseball..." --Babe Ruth

    "Life is beautiful"-Don Corleone right before he died.

    "The expert on anything was once a beginner" -Baseball poster I own.


    Left cprog on 1-3-2005. Don't know when I am coming back. Thanks to those who helped me over the years.

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    > "OS stage of booting"?
    MBR / After the POST. When the BIOS hands your computer over to the operating system.
    BTW, when your mouse cursor no longer has the hourglass(or your harddrive & cpu are all idling), then your computer has fully booted.

    Like I said before though, the only problem you'll have(more than likely) is the fact that your operating system will have new hardware to deal with. Because, for all that time when the hard drives were in their original machines, they were used to a set amount of hardware, now the OS has to provide more support for new hardware.

  10. #10
    Refugee face_master's Avatar
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    1. Open case
    2. Unplug the IDE cable and power cable from HDD
    3. Take the HDD out of the bay
    4. Make sure the jumpers on the new HDD are set to Primary Master
    5. Place new HDD in the bay
    6. Plug it in just like the other one was in (using the exact same plugs as the old one was using)
    7. Turn on computer, enter BIOS
    8. Make sure that the new HDD is set to Primary Master

  11. #11
    Me -=SoKrA=-'s Avatar
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    You shouldn't have problems if you follow the instructions from the other replies. However, I'd like to point out that I was going to switch two HDs between my two computers. When I booted them up, both computers gave me blue screens of death saying that the HD drivers were probably wrong. The first thing I though was: "How can the drivers be wrong, the drivers are inside the HD". I tried switching them back again to the original computers and everything worked fine.
    WinXP only allows somehting like three hardware changes a year on your computer for some stupid reason, so when I changed them XP went crazy.
    Beware of XP, otherwise you shouldn't have any problems.
    SoKrA-BTS "Judge not the program I made, but the one I've yet to code"
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  12. #12
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    Swapping drive's between PC with minor hardware differences
    should not affect XP too much on the swapped drive. However,
    If you have a different Motherboard, CPU and Graphic's Card,
    XP might just say "You're not going anywhere today!".
    --

  13. #13
    Its not rocket science vasanth's Avatar
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    With Windows XP it is a big problem.. It dosent allow you to boot from the nes HDD(if the new HDD has XP).. It thinks that you are trying to pirate XP and use it on more than on PC>. but no probls with other versions of Windows.. And if you are using the new HDD for file transfer no problem at all just make the new HDD jumper to Slave( only for data transfer)..

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    >If you have a different Motherboard, CPU and Graphic's Card,
    XP might just say "You're not going anywhere today!".<

    Which is likely if the PC is superior in every way (and it won't go anywhere). In which case you may need to do something like this

    >With Windows XP it is a big problem.. It dosent allow you to boot from the nes HDD(if the new HDD has XP).. It thinks that you are trying to pirate XP and use it on more than on PC>. <

    You can get an activation code over the phone, in this case (edit - in any case it's not being re-installed on a new hard drive so this is not an issue).
    Last edited by JoeSixpack; 03-01-2003 at 04:37 PM.
    Joe

  15. #15
    left crog... back when? incognito's Avatar
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    Thank you for all of your suggestions people.

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