Can i clone my hard drive? including OS?

[warcraft7]

is there a program or something that will let me copy my laptops hard drive to a 3.5 one the desktop PC im building. i have an adapter for hooking up one by USB and i also have an external i can use. so is there a way to do this so i dont have to buy a new OS n all that? or would i just have to get some adapters and use my laptop drive in it? haven't bought anything yet only got about 350$ for a "gaming" PC lol

 

[Ghan]

There is software to do this, but I can pretty much guarantee that even if you do, you're not going to have a good time. Windows gets extremely angry when you change motherboards on it after it has been installed. I recently helped someone who had take his laptop hard drive and plugged it in to a desktop he was building, and the OS refused to even boot. It would bluescreen before the login screen came up.

Even if you could get it to work, I would still HIGHLY advise installing a fresh copy of Windows.

 

[warcraft7]

ugg...why must OSes be so expensive...

 

[Ghan]

Ubuntu is free.

 

[Slapshot136]

or if you have a retail license you can do a sysprep which will remove all the drivers from windows (while leaving your programs intact) and run through the installation again (aka install all the drivers for the new machine), although a clean install would still probably be better

 

[warcraft7]

ya i got linux on an old PC and it works fine for surfing the web but obviously i want to play games and those seem a bit hard to get running on linux...

All i have is my prebuilt laptop and my friends laptop, both started with vista and got upgraded to 7 so i dont have any actual disc otherwise i wouldnt be having any problems...=/

Although if Linux could run games just fine id use it way more than windows...my old PC can convert videos faster than my modern laptop lol

 

[Slapshot136]

my old PC can convert videos faster than my modern laptop lol

your comparing a desktop to a laptop.. not too much of a surprise there

have you tried running the games under wine?

 

[warcraft7]

your comparing a desktop to a laptop.. not too much of a surprise there

have you tried running the games under wine?

not yet but i doubt it can do much if i remember right it can run a choppy warcraft 3, my laptop has better specs than it lol

 

[Accname]

Its generally a bad idea to try to change the hardware without reinstalling the OS because hardware and OS are tightly bound together in various ways. If hardware is changed but the settings on the OS are not then chances are high you will run into various problems which might even damage your other data.