Swapping HDD's, interesting question

[i_am_mowerman]

Hi, this may be a bit silly but...
I am thinking about doing a fresh XP Pro install on a HDD I have lying about for spare. My current HDD I'm using has important(ish) stuff on it, and I'm asking that if I stick in the spare HDD and stick XP Pro on it, if I want to swap it with my current HDD that I would have taken out to fit spare in, would it still work so I could retriev stuff?

I only ask as I couldn't use this current HDD with all the stuff on it, with my new other PC I just built, so I bought a new HDD for that one.

 

[semi-pro waster]

I'm not sure if I have this correct but is the question could you create a new Windows boot drive and then retrieve the data from the old Windows drive? If so then yes, sure, you might have to set the master/slave designations (jumpers on the back of IDE drives only) and/or sort the boot order in bios but it is simple enough to do.

 

[i_am_mowerman]

Sorry, I really couldn't expess what I meant.
I mean that, using another HDD and insatlling XP from go works, but when I just tried sticking in my old HDD that I wanted to use in my new PC, it wouldnt have none of it, so I needed to buy a new one.

So, with my current PC, if I were to swap my old HDD with a new one, but then decide to swap it back to my old HDD, would it still work? Or does something change in BIOS or something when I install my new HDD, therefor making my original old HDD not usable?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Ah right, I think I've got what you mean now. Provided you don't alter the boot sector of the old hard drive to stop it booting into Windows you can swap them around to your hearts content, you might need to change the boot order in bios depending on if it is SATA or IDE but there should be no problems.

 

[i_am_mowerman]

K thanks I'll try that tonight!