[RESOLVED] Can I insert my old hard drive onto a new pc?

i know that u can just add the old hard disk to the new pc and use it as like a data drive also storing your software that u would like to keep. or u could replace the new hard disk with the software on and use it as the primary hard disk. has the old harddisk got an operating system?

Not real sure I'm clear on what it is you wanna accomplish here. Of course you can always install the older drive in a newer machine as a slave, assuming the newer machine has room for and will support a slave drive (most desktops/towers will).

You can even get an outboard drive carriage/enclosure which connects to a machine via either USB or Firewire, and install a drive into that to get pretty much the same effect.

With a little more fiddling around than required to set up the old drive as a slave or an outboard, it could be mounted in the new machine as a master, but that sorta defeats a lot of the purpose of buying a new machine in the first place; would you buy a new car and swap the engine out of your trade-in into the new car?

You might find that Windows' File And Settings Transfer Wizard will do the trick for you, but I think mebbe what you really oughtta be looking at is 3rd-party drive-migration software, that will let you move the contents and settings of an existing drive from one machine to another. One such is PCMover, another is Detto IntelliMover - there are lotsa others, I don't endorse one of those I listed over any other, I just offer them as examples. If you do decide to explore 3rd-party apps, research them well before buying one - get the one that seems to you to offer the most bang for the buck in your particular situation. Reviews abound, PC Magazine, PC World, and CNet, among others, all have pretty good review pages, just search for "Migration Software"

While its slanted to their product, Dell offers a pretty good article on transfering files and settings from one machine to another HERE, and Gary Woodruff has written a very informative article on the Windows File And Settings Transfer Wizard available HERE

Finally, in many instances, networked machines frequently can run apps and/or access/manipulate/copy/transfer data resident on any other machine on the network - not always, not every app, not every file, but a properly configured network can give you a whole buncha flexibiltiy. Just as a for-example, I sometimes download or create-and-save something while operating from one particular machine, and later discover I have no idea to which machine or which of which machine's optical or outboard drives I sent it to - great entertainment