I purchased a Gateway 500 XLs P-4 tower 3 GHz, 512 Mb, 40 Gb H D. without any O.S. I am running a Dell Dimension 4100 800GHz, 512 Mb, 60 Gb H.D. with windows XP SP3. My Hard drive is 2 years old.
Can I remove the H.D. from the Dell & install it in the Gateway and boot up or must I do a fresh install? I do all my own work & have repaired a Dell laptop dead from a coffee spill, so I have some experience, but I am more of a hobbiest.
The two computers use video (Nvidia)& sound (Creative Labs) cards from the same suppliers, but not the same models. Will my XP have the needed drivers?
I intend to move some of the optical drives and disk drives also. At least move as much as there is space for.

Thanks for any help

I found my answer - NO! I'll do a fresh install of XP.

Hello All,

I'm replying to my own thread just for info.

I fooled around with UBUNTU for a couple of weeks, but it takes too much thought. Besides, I am using a winmodem & installing UBUNTU drivers for it was way too much work. So I bought a cheap, legal XP 2000 Professional SP 2 disk and loaded it on the Gateway drive (Maxtor 40 G).

Before I shut down the Dell, I used EASEUS Partition Master home edition to copy the C:/ hard drive to the secondary hard drive. Then I removed the secondary drive and installed it in the Gateway. When I booted the Gateway, the secondary drive was read as a file! I then had all of my data available along with most of my downloads. Some transferred to the new O.S., others didn't. All I really wanted was my files anyway. I also moved the floppy drive & the CD-RW drive to the Gateway.
I found some cheap PC333 RAM, so now, for about $80, I have a Pentium 4 (3GHz & 1Gb of RAM, 80 GB disk memory) which is WAY faster than my old Dell .

blithe.spirits