Hi, I am relatively new to building PC's although I am aware of all the basics required to get one up and running. Recently, I have decided to build a brand new PC from scratch and have planned out what I need to buy for it however there has been something that I have been baffled by, so I thought I would get some advice before going ahead with it. Right, I have decided to build a brand new P4 PC (I am currently using a rather old AMD Duron PC) and have already ordered a few components (motherboard, RAM, case, PSU, FDD, and CD/DVD drive) with intentions to buy the rest (CPU, Graphics, etc) next week. Although I was wondering if I could simply install my current HDD (with Windows XP OS already installed) with my brand new PC instead of buying a new HDD and reinstalling Windows. Is it that simple? I know I would have to consider installing new drivers (particularly for the new motherboard) but would the system still run with this new hardware otherwise? I would shortly buy a brand new HDD anyway (as it is rather old and limited in storage) and get hold of the Windows 2000 OS (due to certain peripherals being incompatible with XP unfortunately), but I was just wondering if I could make do with my current HDD until then. Cheers! Matt
Basically, no. You're hardware is going to change so much, that it would be impossible to just plug it in and boot up and it to work. My guess (and a guess it is) is that you may be able to still use that windows install if when you first boot up, you have your windows XP install disk in the drive and do a "repair" to windows XP. Perhaps then, it will change a couple of configurations to make your pc able to boot to it. Once again, that's just a guess and I doubt it will even work. If you're worried about files that you want to keep on your old system, why not just burn 'em on to a cd? Best of luck!
