Can I move my hard drive to a new computer and have Windows work?
Hi, everyone. Leo, Notenboom here for askleo.com.
This is one of those I'll call it a controversial question because you will
get answers that run the gamut from yes to no, and everything in between.
My answer is no.
You shouldn't really count on it.
And even if it seems to work, you shouldn't really count on it.
But you will get strong answers
from others that will say that yes, it can work.
And of course, there are tools that supposedly will help you get it to work.
Let's take a look at exactly why this is such a confusing and unclear answer
and why the answer might validly range from yes to no to all points in between.
One of the issues is that when you set up
Windows, you're setting it up for that specific computer.
Now, a lot of components are the same
across all computers, but a lot of them aren't.
A lot of the things you have installed
on your computer aren't installed on other computers and vice versa.
Similarly, you may have a different motherboard with different components,
different amounts of Ram, different amounts of disk, all that kind of stuff.
A lot of that stuff is stuff that Windows can easily account for.
But some of it is, again, very specific to the machine that it was installed on.
That's what setup is all about the setup process when you actually install Windows,
what it's doing is it is configuring Windows to all the specifics and all
the nuances of the computer on which you are installing it.
Now, windows, of course,
tries really hard to reconfigure itself when it sees a hardware change.
When you replace a hard disk, when you add more memory,
when you add a USB device, when you add or replace other pieces
of hardware, Windows will go through the process of Oops something changed.
Let's see if I could reconfigure myself with the proper drivers or whatever proper
settings need to be updated for this changed or new piece of hardware.
It was years ago called Plug and Play.
You could plug something into your computer and continue to play.
The problem is, when you move a hard drive from one machine to another,
that hard drive contains Windows as configured for the machine that it was in.
When you move it to a different machine,
it looks to Windows like everything changed.
Absolutely everything changed except for the hard drive itself.
That's asking a lot of Windows to try and recover from
it will try really hard to reconfigure itself to everything
that it sees as having changed, which, like I said, is everything.
The closer the new hardware the new machine is to the old machine in terms
of its hardware, its motherboard, it's everything.
The higher your chances of success.
Clearly, companies have been doing this for a long time.
They will buy hundreds of identical
machines, clone a hard drive for each machine from one image,
and that image of Windows will just work because the machines are identical
most of the time.
When I get this question, the machines aren't identical.
You're upgrading to a new machine or you're replacing a machine with something
else, and it's a completely different piece of hardware.
That is what puts stress on Windows own
hardware change, detection and recovery approach.
It's risky now.
The reason I say it could be yes,
no or anything in between is you will generally see
three kinds of behaviors if you try this first, is it'll just fail hard?
In other words, Windows won't even boot,
or it'll just be really obvious as it tries to come up that it's not coping
with this new world that it sees very well at all.
You may not discover issues for a while until you happen to use a piece
of hardware that is different than it was on the original machine or something else
comes along and stresses the new machine in some way that exposes a difference
between the new and the old machine that Windows was unable to properly
account for, and you might not see any problems at all.
It can happen.
The problem, of course, is that it may appear to work.
It may appear to work for quite some time,
but you may not realize that something's wrong for quite some time.
When you finally do something that, like I said, stresses the hardware or
exercises something in a new way that Windows was unable to account for.
My position is very clear.
It's not worth the risk.
Not if you're moving it to a machine
that you expect to use and want to be able to use reliably.
The right way to install Windows on a new
machine is to install Windows on a new machine.
In other words, run the Windows setup
program, run Windows installation so that it has a chance to properly identify
all of the hardware on this new machine and all of the characteristics that it
needs to know about in order to work reliably.
And yeah, when you've got a drive
from another machine, an old machine that has an installation
of Windows on it, you're walking away from that installation of Windows.
You either would erase that hard drive and install Windows from scratch on it
on the new machine, or you might install that other drive,
the old drive as a second drive in the new machine.
That's one way of transferring your data, making the data transfer significantly
easier than pretty much almost anything else.
Another approach, of course,
if you've got a machine that doesn't have room for a second hard drive is to throw
the old hard drive into an external enclosure.
That way, you've got a USB external disk
that initially you can get all your old data off of and in the long term, well,
you can use however you want to use an external hard drive.
Now, there is one scenario specifically
that I have found to be useful, even when Windows itself isn't
really running properly, doesn't have everything pulled together
for your new hardware, and that is data recovery.
It is one approach that might allow you to recover some data from a machine.
Say the hard drive was, I don't know, encrypted for some reason,
and the only way to get the data off of it is to boot from it so that you could get
that machine's hard disk in unencrypted form.
It may not matter then that Windows isn't
working perfectly as long as it works long enough for you to get your data off.
But then after you've got what you need off of the hard drive, you then go back.
You then reinstall Windows from scratch cleanly and you've got a working system.
So the bottom line here is that, yes, you can give it a try.
Like I said, there are tools that will even claim to do it for you.
There are several of them, and I've used some of them with mixed results.
But the best way to do this, and my recommendation is not. Install
Windows from scratch on your new machine and then use that hard drive
from the other machine as a way to transfer your data over and nothing else.
Hope that was helpful.
I hope that clarifies the position for updates.
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I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com
thanks for watching.