Given a PC with no hard drives but everything else intact, how to get it running?

[Gileotine]

TL;DR what steps do I need to take to start a fully assembled sans hard drives pc?

 

Evening everyone. A friend of mine works at [company] and just gave me one of their e-recycled PCs. Of course, the thing has all the hard-drives ripped out, and I have 4 (2 SSD, 2 regular HDs) that I want to put into the machine. These hard drives came from my broken build a while back.

Trying to retrace what I did to start my first computer, I'm assuming I'm going to need a USB stick with windows downloaded onto it. Problem is I dont have a CD key and I'll have to go and buy that. But what about my old drives? Will the data on there still be usable, or is data 'locked' to my old, destroyed PC? 

 

[Dutch_Master]

For starters, boot a Linux Live CD-R to see what's actually in the system. You don't need a harddrive for that. Next, install the system-OS SSD from your old system and see if it recognises your new PC components. After that, just add more drives. It's likely your data can (and will) be reused. As for the licence key, accept a test licence for now and upgrade to a new key once you've obtained that.

 

Or install Linux outright, no paid-for S/W key required

[Gileotine]

20 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

For starters, boot a Linux Live CD-R to see what's actually in the system. You don't need a harddrive for that. Next, install the system-OS SSD from your old system and see if it recognises your new PC components. After that, just add more drives. It's likely your data can (and will) be reused. As for the licence key, accept a test licence for now and upgrade to a new key once you've obtained that.

 

Or install Linux outright, no paid-for S/W key required

Ah, sorry mate I've never been part of teh linux enviroment, maybe some other time. You think the thing will actually boot out of a completely different computer from the old SSD?

[Average Nerd]

3 minutes ago, Gileotine said:

You think the thing will actually boot out of a completely different computer from the old SSD?

You can transplant a working boot drive from one system into a completely different one, and it usually boots after analyzing the "new" system.

You can also use Rufus to create a "Windows To Go" USB drive with Windows 10, which is capable of booting on a PC that has no storage drives of its own.

[Gileotine]

15 minutes ago, Average Nerd said:

You can transplant a working boot drive from one system into a completely different one, and it usually boots after analyzing the "new" system.

You can also use Rufus to create a "Windows To Go" USB drive with Windows 10, which is capable of booting on a PC that has no storage drives of its own.

we're gonna fire her up in a sec lets see

[Gileotine]

34 minutes ago, Average Nerd said:

You can transplant a working boot drive from one system into a completely different one, and it usually boots after analyzing the "new" system.

You can also use Rufus to create a "Windows To Go" USB drive with Windows 10, which is capable of booting on a PC that has no storage drives of its own.

outstanding she actually just turned on no adjusts needed. Lmao what I'm actually astounded