Ok I know this may sound really stupid, but can one just take a hard drive that was on one machine and stick it on another with completly different parts and have it work? I always thought this would not be possible, but is it?
If you are talking about primary master drive all your drivers for m/board etc would be screwed up, if the OS is XP it might baulk at all the hardware changes and need reactivating, the list goes on. Personally I think ....... way too much drama, back up your files, format, way easier. If you are talking slave, no problem.
Ever since Win98, there have been serious issues with installing a M$ OS on one machine and trying to use to boot another machine. In fact, the few times it has worked at all, the machine ran so poorly that there was no possibility of using it. Ssssslllloooww. Most times they just sit there with a blank screen...sometimes they make it to the Welcome To XP page. So you are better off just reinstalling everything or putting the OS onto a small HDD and booting from that.
I tryed this with a HD that had win98 on it on a machine that was using winXP. After booting, win98 started asking about all the harware and devices, i said no to all of them and after 2 bootup's i was in win98 desktop no problem. edit: i have also tryed this with a HD that had linux installed on a machine that was running winXP. if you remove the HD with winXP and you install the HD with linux, you will have no problems, for a long time before using dual booting thats what i would do lol. it got annoying after a while.
There really isn't much of a problem putting a o/s install on a new motherboard. Especially in 9x based systems are really easy to clear out all the old drivers from the registry. With NT based systems you need to change the IDE controller to standard IDE before swapping or just run a repair install if you can't do that for some reason (like the old board is borked). I personally ran the exact same install of 98 for many years through several motherboards. You might lose a % or two in performance but for me its worth it to avoid the endless hours of setting stuff back up again.
i'm thinking of changing my slave, 20G, to a 160G. so it's quite alright to just swap out the slave and have the o/s see the new HD, no problems? also, i've read that it's better to setup virtual memory on the HD that doesn't contain the o/s and since i'm using 1024MB, the virtual mem should be 512/512, any thoughts on this?
