Switching HDs from 32bit os into 64 hardware

[blk03MitsuES]

I got this one 32bit Xp machine that might die on me soon here at work. Boss is purchasing an emachine that comes with a 64bit AMD processor and Vista. I have thought of just pulling out the HD from the 32bit machine and using it on the 64bit processor one. do you think i'll run into trouble? my understanding is AMD's 64 chips will also run with 32bit software, such as my laptop running 32bit vista home premium on a 64 Turion....

main reason i just want to swap HD's is because, i got a heat transfer label machine that is older and might not run well or at all in Vista, it uses the old parallel port. plus, i cant re install BarTender(label software) because i lost the key for it.

[Airbozo]

YMMV, but I doubt the OS installed on that HD will boot in a different system. If they had similar setups maybe, but doubtful.

Yes, AMD cpus _will_ run either 32 or 64 bit OS's.

There are many issues moving an HD installed with windows on one system and expecting it to even boot on a second system. If it does boot all the drivers will be dorked, including system board drivers. You can try to boot into safe mode and install the correct drivers, but in my experience you will have issues down the road if that even works.

[blk03MitsuES]

what does YMMV mean?

[slytherock]

Google is your friend, don't be afraid he don't bite

Your Mileage May Vary

[Cannibal23]

in my experiance taking a drive thats installed with windows xp and putting it into another pc that does not have the same drive contoler chipset results in a bluescreen / reboot blue screen message is usually a stop error quoting Inaccessable_Boot_Device or something to that effect.

the cause of this is that windows tries to load the drive controler chipset driver so that it can talk to the hard disk and continue the boot processs. if the chipset isnt the same the driver fails causing said screen.

the only option that i think might stand a chance of working would be the sysprep tool that comes free with windows. there is a part in there that you can tell it to redetect hardware. this may force it to want a new driver for that but i have not confirmed that through experiance. i still doubt that it will work but if you dont have any other option that method is worth a shot.

[blk03MitsuES]

i did it one time from an amd system to a pentium one, Asus board to MSI board and all i had to do was update a few drivers and everything still running, but both systems were XPs, dont know if that helped.

thats why i wondered if the switch between xp and vista was possible...

[Cannibal23]

its not weather the pc currently has vist or xp on it that will be the issue. i move hard drives installed with xp from machine to machine all the time here at work but there all the same motherboard with the same chipset. when i try to move a drive installed with xp to a motherboard with a diffrent chipset thats when there is problems.

[.Maleficus.]

its not weather the pc currently has vist or xp on it that will be the issue. i move hard drives installed with xp from machine to machine all the time here at work but there all the same motherboard with the same chipset. when i try to move a drive installed with xp to a motherboard with a diffrent chipset thats when there is problems.

Hit the nail on the head. 99% of the time you won't be able to move a hard drive (and expect to boot Windows) to another unique system. There are ways around that (I posted it somewhere here...) but it's a PITA and doesn't always work. It didn't work well for me going from a 965P to a 680i. You'd be better off reinstalling Windows.

[ClearCaseMan]

Hit the nail on the head. 99% of the time you won't be able to move a hard drive (and expect to boot Windows) to another unique system. There are ways around that (I posted it somewhere here...) but it's a PITA and doesn't always work. It didn't work well for me going from a 965P to a 680i. You'd be better off reinstalling Windows.

the percentaqe of working is much higher than 1% you can get much better results like closer to 90% if you sysprep the drive you should also edit the boot.ini if you have your info ahead of time. if you are going to take yourtime you can put the drivers in the driver cache folder in the I386 folder in windows. this will help with finding drivers with out the cd aheadf of time. if you do all three things you can get well over 90% reliabity. with the change.

[Outlaw]

Couldn't you just put the hd into the new system as a slave hd and copy over what you need to the new hd? or backup, format, reinstall? I only assume you are doing this to save time