New computer question

I am building my own computer and was wondering if I could use my old hard drive from my old dell computer that has windows xp home on it from dell. Will there be any compatability issue with it with my new hardware?

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Comments

seuss_ssues

If you plan on just using the HD there shouldnt be any problem.

If you plan on using the HD and its windows xp instillation then its not likely to boot. A repair install will probably get you into windows enough atleast to download all the necesary drivers for your new hardware.

blargoe

It should be compatible, but make sure you have room for the drive. Is your old hard drive IDE or SATA? Some new computers only have one IDE interface onboard which can accept two devices, so if your new computer has two optical drives (CD/DVD/RW) you may not have room for another device.

kujayhawk93

seuss_ssues wrote:

If you plan on just using the HD there shouldnt be any problem.

If you plan on using the HD and its windows xp instillation then its not likely to boot. A repair install will probably get you into windows enough atleast to download all the necesary drivers for your new hardware.

I'm with seuss_suess, there's probably only a 50-50 chance that the machine would even boot using the previous XP installation, due to differences in the hardware. The smart thing to do would be to back up everything you want to save off the drive, reformat and do a clean install of XP in the new machine.