Can transplanting a SATA drive from one machine to another damage it ( Partition/filesystem corruption )

NoiseCrime · February 3, 2019

Hi,

Got myself into a bit of pickle and would appreciate any input.

Are there any issues/pitfalls with physically transferring a primary boot HDD from one PC to be a secondary HDD of another?

Can the act of installing the HDD into another PC cause damage, specially resulting in the HDD partitions not being recognized in Disk Management and the whole thing coming up as 'RAW'?

Please note i'm not trying to boot from the transplanted HDD and the PC booted as normal from its HDD using Win 7.

The reason for asking is my mates 12 year old Vista PC finally died last week. He'd mentioned some issues with the monitor and once I got to look at it I instantly diagnosed it being a graphic card failure. It had all trademark signs, at least to me, after being on for about 5 minutes it exhibited pixel corruption that progressively got worse. Some odd pixels but thinking about it now more like memory corruption of Vista render elements, e.g. explorer, windows, popups etc. In fact I suspect the GPU completely failed as I was there as the monitor went black/turned off completely for no good reason. Although that could have been a sign of something worse, maybe a PSU failure?

Anyway while he could look for a replacement GPU ( second hand ) I suggest that he instead take my old Win 7 PC which was a few years younger than his and more powerful. I figured this would be the easier solution especially for the future since not even browsers actively support Vista any more and so moving to a Win 7 machine would give a few more years of application support.

With this in mind I grabbed his two internal HDD's ( both 160GB SATA) and took them home to install into my old WIN 7 system. I didn't know which of the two drives were the old boot drive so I just picked one at random. My Win 7 machine had a spare power connector ( its one of those wires that have an end connector but then two others 'spliced' into the line or daisy chained - don't know correct terminology ) and then I hooked up the SATA cable to a spare connector on the motherboard.

Booted the Win 7 machine and to my horror a dialog popped up saying to format the transplanted drive! I think this happened after Win 7 automatically installed drivers for the new HDD and auto-assigned a drive letter to it.

Did some digging online and discovered the transplanted HDD was coming up as 'RAW' file system under disk management. As far as I could tell looking at device manager the HDD was recognized and drivers installed and claimed to be working. I had been using the Win 7 machine for a day before trying to install the HDD and from what I can tell its in perfect working order. No hardware issues, not temperature issues, no power issues.

My Questions:

The main question I have is that I have a second drive of my mates ( presumably the non-boot data drive from his old machine ). I really want to try installing that into the Win 7 machine as that is probably the more important one with all of his data on it. However now i'm concerned that the act of installing it might corrupt it? Do you think its safe to install this other drive or should I not touch it?

I'm now wondering with the fact that both drives are the same make/model and 160GB if perhaps it was set up in a RAID configuration. Could that explain the issues I was seeing?

With regard to the corrupted HDD my questions are;

1. Have I just been really unlucky and normally you can simply plug & play with modern HDD and OS?

2. Are there any issues normally with transplanting a HDD from one machine to another? Is there anything that the act of installing the drive that could have cause the file system to become corrupt?

3. Does the transplanted drive being a boot drive present any issues as long as i'm not trying to boot from it?

4. I assume if the HDD has a SATA connection and a typical power connector then can you simply just plug and play into a motherboard? No issues with different SATA connector types, which SATA connectors to use or Power consumption/watts/amps etc? I.e. anything on the physical or electrical side of things?

5. Are there any bios settings or set up either on my mates old machine or my new machine that might have caused this issue? I looked through my Win 7 bios and could't find anything useful in there that might help. It says SATA is set to IDE mode, the alternatives are ACHD or RAID.

6. Could my mates drives have been set up in RAID configuration? Is there any way to tell? If they are RAID how the heck do I get them working in my system considering I don't want to boot from them as its a different machine?

7. Any advice on what to do next with this HDD?

Thanks for any help you can give.

General Hardware Information:

Testdisk.exe report for damaged drive - Seagate ST3160812S

Current partition structure:
1 P Dell Utility 0 1 1 5 254 63 96327
Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
2 * HPFS - NTFS 6 30 25 19128 110 54 307200000
2 * HPFS - NTFS 6 30 25 19128 110 54 307200000
Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
3 P HPFS - NTFS 19128 110 55 38903 181 62 317689856
3 P HPFS - NTFS 19128 110 55 38903 181 62 317689856

Disk /dev/sdb - 160 GB / 149 GiB - CHS 19452 255 63
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...
The harddisk (160 GB / 149 GiB) seems too small! (< 241 GB / 224 GiB)

The Windows 7 PC

Intel Core i7-920
ASUS P6T DELUXE
Intel AMT Support: Not Supported
SATA RAID 0/1/5/10: Supported
It has 6 SATA points - 3 of them are difficult to access, but two of those are already used for the original win 7 HDD and a CD_ROM. Another two are easy to access facing vertically upwards on the MB and its one of these that I used - I assume all SATA connections are standard and the same?

Existing HDD - Serial ATA 3Gb/s - Seagate ST3500418AS

NineEyeRon · February 3, 2019

Should be fine.

if there is any data you want to keep back it up to another drive.

NoiseCrime · February 5, 2019

Thanks for the reply i'll give it a go when I get the time in the week.

seagate_surfer · February 5, 2019

When using a drive as a boot drive in another system other than the one where it was originally installed, it may be deactivated meaning that Windows will ask for a valid license key number. The unit going into RAW status is simply bad luck for you. You can try to recover with tools like Recuva and hope for the best: