Help!

A

Agus

Geek Trainee
Hey guys i need some serious help my old computers hard rdive broke its dead and form what i heard if i buy a new hardrive i need to buy a new o.s aswell? well my idea was to buy and old pc and just take out its hardrive
here is the pc i want to buy to take its hardrive off and put it in my old pc(that i want to buy to take out its hardrive)
DELL DIMENSION 4550 DESKTOP COMPUTER

the pc that broke is a HP Pavilion a6500 desktop and here are its specs
HP a6500 specs
can someone plz tell me if its possible i dont realy download stuff so amount of gbs in the hd isnt a problem thnks in advance for the help!
 
The short and sweet of it is - yes, you will need to install an operating system on the new drive. Otherwise you will not be able to use the computer (new or old). If you have any concerns/questions, please come back and ask away.

There are very experienced users in the forum who will be able to help you on your way...
 
Saba is correct, but i will say this, assuming both HDD are SATAII and also assuming the doner box has a 100% legel OS then you should be able to swap out the HDDs[ot]as some specs of doner box are very sparse i cannot guarantee the correctness of this post[/ot]
 
donkey42 said:
....assuming both HDD are SATAII and also assuming the doner box has a 100% legel OS then you should be able to swap out the HDDs....
Click to expand...

Never say never but in my experience, as there are hardware diffrences, the OS will have to be re-installed (in case of Win XP anyway....). In any case, it is a simple test - Plug the drive from the doner PC into your original box and boot the mother up. If it boots into Windows, RESULT! All your problems gone.... you will soon find out if you cannot boot... :doh:
 
Saba said:
Never say never
Click to expand...
point taken Saba, i can do better

as the specs of the original box specify SATAII and SATAII is backward compatable with SATA1 (albiet slower) it will work with older SATA1 but as it doesn't say if any old IDE ports are included its best to assume there arn't any if there were any IDE ports you could almost guarantee it would work

so, to summerize. any SATA HDD will work

Edit: is that ok Saba ?
 
donkey42 said:
Edit: is that ok Saba ?
Click to expand...

Not sure if this is in jest or otherwise... in any case I think that perhaps we are looking at different issues.... if you take a HDD (SATA or otherwise) with an installed OS and simply plant it in another PC, from my experience, this will not work and will require a fresh install of the OS (again, in the case of Windows XP).

Perhaps I completely misunderstood the original thread?
 
There are two big issues, here IMHO.
1), even if the drives are swappable they will recognise theya re not with the original motherboard, etc. so this will fail to fire-up.
This is done to protect the computer "brand" although many think it is more to do with forcing customers to buy expensive Service Contracts.
The cost of a new HDD is quite small; why swap one out of an unknown secondhand PC? Quite obviously an IDE-drive will not connect to a SATA cable and vv . . . .I assume you are not attempting to perform that.
Modern PC are using SATA - it is claimed they are faster than IDE so perhaps that's why IDE went out of favour. At Computer Fairs you can (could?) get USB/IDE adaptors with a power supply all for next to nothing...the same vendors do USB-SATA versions.....this is an easy way to utilise a "suspect" or perhaps "Spare" drive.

2) is software issue...I understand Win98 was the last OS that just ran and ran....with XP and newer, you cannot change hardware without getting Microsoft's "permission" - this stops you running one set of software on two (or more) machines....helps to protect MS profits.
OR you can use Ubuntu - that's free, updates easily and does "nearly" everything Win does......except when it comes to scanning and printing - but don't take my word for that...I'm running XP at least until the HDD croaks.
 
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