Can I use the same hard drive with a new motherboard?

[exsybands]

Just curious because I wanna save as much money as possible.  

[Daniel644]

provided the motherboard has connections to connect to the hard drive yes.

 

the only potential issue may be your WINDOWS INSTALL, if you have Windows Installed already you will likely lose activation of Windows, if you are on Windows 10 this is less of an issue. Another potential issue is if you are using Windows 10 Pro and have the Bitlocker Drive Encryption (or some other Drive Encryption program) enabled then moving the drive to a new machine may activate that and lock you out.

 

best practice is to backup and important data before moving the drive, but in general (assuming your hardware isn't 15 years old or more) the ONLY things that can't be re-used when changing motherboards  is potentially the CPU (if you are switching sockets) and Memory if you are upgrading from a system that had DDR2 or DDR3 the new mobo with DDR4 won't take the older memory. Now 15 years ago you had to worry whether your PSU was a 20 pin or 24 pin and whether your hard drive was SATA or IDE, but those aren't issues for any computer newer then that.

[exsybands]

6 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

provided the motherboard has connections to connect to the hard drive yes.

 

the only potential issue may be your WINDOWS INSTALL, if you have Windows Installed already you will likely lose activation of Windows, if you are on Windows 10 this is less of an issue. Another potential issue is if you are using Windows 10 Pro and have the Bitlocker Drive Encryption (or some other Drive Encryption program) enabled then moving the drive to a new machine may activate that and lock you out.

 

best practice is to backup and important data before moving the drive, but in general (assuming your hardware isn't 15 years old or more) the ONLY things that can't be re-used when changing motherboards  is potentially the CPU (if you are switching sockets) and Memory if you are upgrading from a system that had DDR2 or DDR3 the new mobo with DDR4 won't take the older memory. Now 15 years ago you had to worry whether your PSU was a 20 pin or 24 pin and whether your hard drive was SATA or IDE, but those aren't issues for any computer newer then that.

Thank You

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

58 minutes ago, exsybands said:

Just curious because I wanna save as much money as possible.  

You mean will Windows boot? Varying degrees of success. Every single time I've tried it blue screened immediately. Some people have done it and say it works, to which I say, seriously how long does it take to install Windows? Your system will be way more reliable if you start fresh. There's no point introducing the old gremlins into a new system. 

 

Now, with Windows 10, you should be able to link your license to your Microsoft account and transfer it onto your new machine after a fresh install.