RE: Re: Another topic about PC hard drives

There was sysprep back in W2K that would strip out the drivers and machine
specific stuff.  Never used it myself...

Doug 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Gibbs [mailto:david@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 11:10 AM
To: pctech@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [PCTECH] Re: Another topic about PC hard drives

daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Is anybody aware of any reason why you shouldn't be able to partition, 
> format, and install Windows on a hard drive that's in one PC, pull it 
> out and stick it into another PC.  It sticks in my mind from about ten 
> years ago that was a bad idea due to different BIOS's interpreted the 
> number of cylinders, sectors, etc.

It's always been my experience that this would only work if the two systems
you are moving the drive between are identical.

Windows installs drivers for the cpu, power management, bios, interface
cards, video, network, etc, that are specific to the system it's being
installed on.

I have heard that it's possible to strip windows down to the absolute bare
minimum by uninstalling all drivers before moving the drive ... but I
wouldn't bet the farm on that.

Linux, on the other hand, will generally move from system to system without
a single problem.  I've upgraded the hardware on the midrange.com system
many times without making any modifications to the software.  I just move
the hard drives, boot the system, it notices the configuration change, and
starts asking me configuring the new hardware and unconfiguring the old.

david
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