How to boot from an old hard drive(SATA windows XP) using a new CPU,MOBO,GPU,PSU,RAM?

Question

my old hard drive has installed windows XP, no partitions, 95% full. my old system is broken (the old CPU,MoBo,GPU,PSU,RAM). with the new system i'll be buying, im planning on using the old hard drive since i have many applications installed in there and the settings are all modified. i cant recreate those..

can i just run it in safe mode and install the drivers of new parts and uninstall the older ones

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

Generally, it should boot just fine, unless you are changng your class of CPU (different socket, different amount of cores etc) in which case you will get a BSOD on boot, in which case you will have to do a repair install. Either way you will probably have to re-activate windows (due to new mobo)

Source(s):

Lots of upgrades over the years.

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

my old CPU+mobo is AMD athlon x2 3800+ & ASUS A8M2N-LA

new ones are intel dual core E5200 + gigabyte G31M-ES2C

it's gotta be a challenge since it is my first time doing something like this

but if all fails, ill just buy a new HDD and do cloning-i guess at least this one copies installed app

Answer 2

You don't have to do nothing. When you get your new system just connect your old drive as the primary drive and the system will boot from it. You may get a lot of "New device found" messages when the system boots because of all new hardware, but that's about it.

Answer 3

yes, you can do it...but
it takes a lot of knowledge !
best if you get a second drive, install xp on it, than instal a "cloner" program like ACRONIS, it will copy the second (old) drive as an IMAGE and repopulate the new drive.
you can later use it as storage, back up, or RAID 1,

Answer 4

Rolle is right. Divot is wrong.

Answer 5

It can go either way. Sometimes, it 'just works' without any problems. Other times, you get a blue screen with error messages like 'inaccessible boot device'.

It's always possible to make it work with sufficient effort. But it can be quite the challenge. It mostly depends how different the hardware in the two motherboards is.

Tip: Set your BIOS in the new computer to put its SATA/IDE ports in emulation (or IDE) mode. Don't use AHCI or RAID. This will make the new computer look more like the old one and increase the chances that it will boot.