[SOLVED] Can i swap a linux mint harddrive from a different laptop into one which had windows 10 previously ?

pratsj9

Honorable
Jul 12, 2014
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0
10,510
I have 2 DELL laptops one is on windows 10 (Latitude 3460) and the other is on Linux Mint 19 (Dell XPS l502x). I basically want to swap their harddrives and the harddrive with linux mint needs to be installed and booted on the 1st laptop which had windows on it . So is this possible by simply swapping the drives and keeping a bootable drive ready of the linux mint distro in case any booting issues occur ?
 

pratsj9

Honorable
Jul 12, 2014
8
0
10,510

pratsj9

Honorable
Jul 12, 2014
8
0
10,510
It seems you can move a linux mint hdd into another PC - https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=200816#:~:text=You can use my rEFInd,rEFInd to the hard disk.

It may not work so well if you try to get windows to work in other laptop though
Hi i just had one more doubt though

It seems my windows machine has a UEFI boot setup whereas the linux system had a legacy boot setup so should i change the windows system to a legacy boot setup as well before inserting the linux harddrive ?
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
Hi i just had one more doubt though

It seems my windows machine has a UEFI boot setup whereas the linux system had a legacy boot setup so should i change the windows system to a legacy boot setup as well before inserting the linux harddrive ?
yes or it won't boot.

it might.. uefi is backwards compatible so it can boot both
legacy only knows one way, but as the drive is the way it knows, setting it to legacy likely speed up process.