swapping hard drives

[nadleeh]

Hi guys,

my current laptop is a dell xps 15 which constantly over heats(even under low demand) dispite it being on a cooler; so i got fed up of this and baught a new laptop. however my new laptop has a conventional HDD where as my xps 15 has a samsung 840SSD. how do i swap out the hdd with the SSD without completely formatting it, i dont have a spare copy of win8.

please help.

 

thanks in advance. :)

Nadleeh

[Youbetternot]

I believe you can just swap it out

[Oshino Shinobu]

So, you want to take out the HDD from the new laptop and replace it with your old SSD? Are you wanting to keep all of the data from the SSD?

 

If so, I think you need to create a system image of the SSD and format it and reinstall windows from the system image. I'd image that it's similar to a normal HDD to SSD transfer, but you just have to put the data back on the same SSD.

[Oshino Shinobu]

I believe you can just swap it out

Wouldn't windows need a new install because it's on a different motherboard etc.?

[Youbetternot]

Wouldn't windows need a new install because it's on a different motherboard etc.?

but it's a laptop

[Oshino Shinobu]

but it's a laptop

But it still counts as a new computer, so Windows isn't registered to that laptop. (I think)

 

When my sister got a new laptop, we had to reinstall windows on the old HDD. I could be wrong, but that's what I know from my experiences with laptops.

[Youbetternot]

Here

http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid+state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows

[Oshino Shinobu]

New suggestion: If you have an external drive anywhere, make a system image backup and then try to just swap the drives over. If that doesn't work, then you may need to system image. 

[Youbetternot]

Wouldn't windows need a new install because it's on a different motherboard etc.?

Yea it does