Windows OS

Beef Boss · April 29, 2017

So I have an old pc running windows XP home edition. And I'll be building a PC with windows 10. Now, let's say I hate waiting for the old one to boot up to get files off of it, could I just swap the hard drives? I mean I would think I could just take the hard drive that has windows xp on it and swap it so the new one can just get the files off of it. Or no?

TheRandomness · April 29, 2017

-Thread moved to Storage Devices.

79wjd · April 29, 2017

Yes, you can just put it in the new computer -- just make sure to not accidentally format it.

tlink · April 29, 2017

yea that will work perfectly fine, i do this on a regular basis to make backups because i have no automated process yet. just plugging it in and making sure it isn't your boot drive is enough. you won't be able to run a lot of the programs on there though unless they required no installation.

Droid8Apple · April 30, 2017

As others said, yep no problems. If you used Windows to make a recovery image before you can also just mount those via disk management, but for yours it's just plug and play.

It'll also be faster to transfer the stuff from old hard drive to new over the motherboards sata controller than it would to add a middle man drive to transfer between old and new drives, as that'll likely be USB 3.0ish at best.