[deemac02]

I have a dud Dell.
I am conidering an upgrade and want to know if the HD is swappable between makes.
I just want to d/l some data to a flash card and swap back to the new HD.
The old HD contains an o/s of course, but it is not the same as the new m/c. I don't think that matters, unlIess it's the o/s that is the problem.
I don't believe so, but the current m/c dies on XP boot up, then it won't even boot from the m/b.
It might be the CMOS battery, but I want a new m/c anyway. (or rather my grandson does, his games are now too sophisticated for my simple Dell)

Incidentally. Admin...............the spec of my current desktop m/c will not update. The spec below is rubbish. I changed it years ago but the site won't update it. Have I got a problem ???

[mrss]

Your original plan is a little unwieldy.

Don't swap drives. Connect the old drive as a second hard drive in the new PC. There are two ways to do this.

1) Buy a USB enclosure for the old drive. In the States, they can be had for $20 USD, which includes power supply, cable, and enclosure.

2) Open up the new PC and cable the old drive in. Now your old drive is likely a parallel ATA drive with a wide flat ribbon IDE cable for data. Your new PC will probably have a serial ATA (SATA) drive which uses a different cable, but it may have have an IDE cable for the CD/DVD drives. You would use that. If the DVD is SATA, there may be a socket for an IDE cable.

While (2) is free, (1) eliminates opening up a new PC and mussing with cablles..