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Hard drive and windows

TheFlanksterGuy
By TheFlanksterGuy
in Storage Devices
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Go to solution Solved by TetraSky,

While it is possible, windows will deactivate itself due to hardware change. It will also cause drivers issue since you will have drivers from the old PC loading up instead of the new drivers of the new PC. 

If you want to reuse an old drive, you should format it and reinstall windows.

Though it really depends on how old this drive is. If it's a couple years old(like 5+), you might be better off served buying a new drive/SSD and use the current one as a second drive for things like your games.

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I am building a new computer and deciding if I want to get a new hard drive and windows or to reuse my old hard drive with windows install. Is it possible to reuse the hard drive with the os system in it on a new build?

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Sometimes it is possible to reuse the same Windows installation, but is never recommended. You'll experience all sorts of stuff like driver errors, general slowness, etc. And that's if it will boot at all. Just get a new drive (or reuse the old one, but backup data first) and reinstall Windows. 

Main System: Phobos

AMD Ryzen 7 2700 (8C/16T), ASRock B450 Steel Legend, 16GB G.SKILL Aegis DDR4 3000MHz, AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB (XFX), 960GB Crucial M500, 2TB Seagate BarraCuda, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations/macOS Catalina

 

Secondary System: York

Intel Core i7-2600 (4C/8T), ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3, 16GB GEIL Enhance Corsa DDR3 1600MHz, Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB, 240GB ADATA Ultimate SU650, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations

 

Older File Server: Yet to be named

Intel Pentium 4 HT (1C/2T), Intel D865GBF, 3GB DDR 400MHz, ATI Radeon HD 4650 1GB (HIS), 80GB WD Caviar, 320GB Hitachi Deskstar, Windows XP Pro SP3, Windows Server 2003 R2

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  • Solution

While it is possible, windows will deactivate itself due to hardware change. It will also cause drivers issue since you will have drivers from the old PC loading up instead of the new drivers of the new PC. 

If you want to reuse an old drive, you should format it and reinstall windows.

Though it really depends on how old this drive is. If it's a couple years old(like 5+), you might be better off served buying a new drive/SSD and use the current one as a second drive for things like your games.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3700x / GPU: Asus Radeon RX 6750XT OC 12GB / RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x8GB DDR4-3200
MOBO: MSI B450m Gaming Plus / NVME: Corsair MP510 240GB / Case: TT Core v21 / PSU: Seasonic 750W / OS: Win 10 Pro

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