Laptop HD in desktop?

SpitfireIV

Hi guys!

My days with laptops are at an end!! I've owned until recently a crappy HP Pavillion (one of the ones with the dodgy graphics card fault) which died on meearlier this week, not a spark of life in it, I tried the 'reflow' home fix with got it going for a few weeks, but, it failed. Then, my backup lappy, a Toshiba,which gave me nothing but trouble since I got it 6 years back or so, that, decided to die too!! So, its back to the more reliable, easier to fix desktops for me!!


Anyway, I had an old Dell Dimension 3000 which I hauled out of the attic, I know its a fairly old base to work off, will probably have to get a new mobo, graphics card and ram. I'll upgrade the ram for starters (bring it up to 2GB as its only 512mb at the moment! :rolleyes:) and get an ok'ish graphic card, something basic enough as I'm not a gamer but would like something a little decent for photo editing, watching vids online etc.

Anyway, what I'm wondering is, my HP lappy at Christmas had Windows 7 installed on it, but, I cant use it now! . Maybe a silly question, but, if I got the appropriate connections could I hook up my laptops HD to the desktop (fix it into the inside of the tower) and use that to run my desktop, ie use Windows 7 etc just like on the Lappy while still having Windows XP on the original desktop hard drive.

Cheers!

Deano12345

What you will need is a 5.25'' to 3.5'' adapter,and a spare spot in the tower,if you have those both,your sorted

dreamers75

3.5 to 2.5 Sata or IDE depening on lappie HD is the adapter you need.

It will most likely not work but hey you can try it and try fix the errors you get as almost every part in your system is changed and the drivers will need to be installed. Xp had a feature to stop this and you could just copy your genuine OS onto as many HDs as possible assume Win7 has it too.

Only tip i can think off is when you boot for the 1st time boot into safe mode and try install the drivers there if it works.

SpitfireIV

Cheers guys!!

Got some advice from myneighbour (a computer savvy from the early days of computers! ) and we figured the best course of action for me wouldbe to get a new mother board, power supply unit and processor. With the new mobo and psu SATA cables are now the standard(?) so it couldnt be much trouble hooking the laptop HD up. I was going to get a convertor, a 'SATA - IDE/ATAPI convertor' that fitted onto the back of the lappy HD, but I wont bother with that now.

What I cant understand though is, if that HD came from a HP laptop, if I try and boot from it/use it as my primary hard drive without formatting it, wont the computer say 'what the feck?! This aint a HP I'm in now, I'm not gonna work!!'

Like, for instance. The hard drive thats in the Dell at the moment is an 80GB and has XP installed on it, its what came pre installed, but it was my bro's computer and he had it all messed up, so I'd be looking to do a clean install using the DELL cd's providing (Reformat disc, utilities etc. There was no seperate 'Windows XP' disc, just a recovery disc). So, I build up a new desktop and go to reformat, but, my computer isnt really a 'DELL' anymore, it'd be like I guess me trying to do a clean install of a Toshiba laptop using HP discs, it wouldnt work, right? Will I have to source a full version of Windows, install this, plus all the additional software to go with the new components?

ED E

I dont know a huge amount about OEM branding, but I suspect you'll be ok.

What may cause issues is that 2.5 is set-up with drivers for the laptop which will be useless for the desktops hardware, but AFAIK 7 will drop to generics until you install the correct ones yourself(Dont be surprised by a 800x600 screen first boot:)).

If the machine is really that old though the general consensus here usually seems to suggest a from scratch approach. Dell always want you to buy parts from them:rolleyes:

marco_polo

Unfortunately as the laptop is likely running an OEM version of windows 7 that is tied to the HP system, when you move it to the Dell and it detects the new hardware configuration on startup, reactivation will probably fail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Locked_Preinstallation

marco_polo

marco_polo wrote: »

Unfortunately as the laptop is likely running an OEM version of windows 7 that is tied to the HP system, when you move it to the Dell and it detects the new hardware configuration on startup, reactivation will probably fail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Locked_Preinstallation

That's correct. The new PC will give a STOP 0x0000007B error on startup. While it is possible to get round this (and it's even possible to reactivate Windows on the "new" hardware), the OEM licence legally dies with the machine it's attached to.

dun79

Your dell recovery disc wont think your Dell PC is a HP just because you put the laptop hdd in,
If you change your motherboard in that Dell PC the Dell recovery disc wont work, (i might be wrong on this) I think the motherboard is what makes it a Dell.

Solitaire

^ Yep, BIOS and mobo PartID tells the OS "who" the system is. But on an older OS it would still work so long as there were no active installs from the same license out there. With Vista and 7 you have to add another €100-odd to each mobo purchase to cover a new OS license :mad:

SpitfireIV

Thanks again guys for the help!

I'm gonna order a new motherboard, processor, ram and PSU, so I wont be using the dell mobo, but a new MSI one. Before my lappy died I had just installed Windows 7 upgrade, I dont have a full version of it unfortunately.

Even if I cant use the HP HDD as my primary and run Win7 off it, will it still be possible to access the contents from my new setup and format the disc?

CroppyBoy1798

CroppyBoy1798 wrote: »

Thanks again guys for the help!

I'm gonna order a new motherboard, processor, ram and PSU, so I wont be using the dell mobo, but a new MSI one. Before my lappy died I had just installed Windows 7 upgrade, I dont have a full version of it unfortunately.

Even if I cant use the HP HDD as my primary and run Win7 off it, will it still be possible to access the contents from my new setup and format the disc?

That would be fine, no problem there. The disk would just be detected as a separate drive and you could copy your stuff off it.