Swapping Hardrives

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What will happen if I swap a hard drive from a Pentium III XP machine to a Pentium 4 Xp machine will the hardrive work in the Pentium 4 machine after I connect it or will I have to configure it in the BIOS.

Professor Falken

 

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Im sure most new BIOSes will see the drive automatically or just do an autodetect in the BIOS.

Or do u mean will the version of XP on the hard drive boot when added to the new PC?

 

I am pretty sure that the hard drive will be detected by the bios. There is a possibilty it might now but I think the p4 will detect the new hard drive.

The main concern here is HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) basicaly when you do a swap like that you want the components to be very similar to the previous station to function properly.

If you would like to find out more about HAL you can go here.

 

Try it! You won't break something.

 

If it has the o/s on it you may need to repair the windows installation before you can boot from it.

 

The hard drive will work as a drive. However - if there is a Windows installation on it anything may happen, from failing to boot at all, all the way to booting after a huge amount of disk activity (and possibly many reboots).

Harry.

 

This has been my experience as well.

 

Depends on the specs of the motherboard. If the PIII PC has a different chipset to PIV PC then yes there will be problems when loading windows.
Also what type of HD is it IDE or SATA connection?

 

Ok I will try it and let you know what happens

 

Don't forget that 'trying it' may destroy the installation of Windows on that hard drive.

Harry.

 

Yep... any document data will probably still be there... but you may lose any chance of booting that Windows installation again.