Swapping hard drives

[ebolamonkey3]

Hey guys I have a PC that's running on Windows XP on hard drive 1. I have my other PC's system (running on Windows 7) cloned on hard drive 2. Can I just plug in the Windows 7 hard drive, boot from there, and back up the data on the XP hard drive? I'll have a new key for the cloned drive (since it's going into a different computer) and probably reformat the XP hard drive after I back everything up, but that'd be ok.

Just want to know if I can do this instead of backing up the XP drive on a portable HDD first, and then put in the windows 7 drive and run off of that.

 

[erixx]

everything is possible, but i would certainly not do it... a clean w7 is the way to go.

anyway, I would ask:
1) what do you want to keep from the xp drive: just copy it manually.
2) why do you want to run a cloned hdd from another system?

A clean win7 DVD installs in no time, 30 minutes or so. And win7 installs from a pendrive in much less... So what is the point of junking around?

 

[ebolamonkey3]

Well, I have a lot of stuff on the XP drive, didn't want to lose anything so I figured I'd just drag all the folders over.

And I run a cloned hdd b/c I got everything set up just the way I like it and I don't want to reinstall all the programs and all that.