I'm Building A New Computer, Can I Use My Old Harddrive?

[Livingood]

My computer recently suffered water damage from me being a complete idiot. Hard drive works still in fairly certain. When I build a new computer I want to keep files from this hard drive however. Am I able to still use it or how do I go about this?

 

[hang-the-9]

You can keep your files, but you need to (or at least it's very highly recommended) re-install Windows clean. Aside from the licensing issue if you have an OEM copy, in most cases the system will not boot off the old drive, or if it does you will have slowness issues that won't go away till you do a clean setup. Better off getting a new hard-drive, install Windows on that and use your original one as a secondary drive for backups.

 

[aquielisunari]

You can keep your files, but you need to (or at least it's very highly recommended) re-install Windows clean. Aside from the licensing issue if you have an OEM copy, in most cases the system will not boot off the old drive, or if it does you will have slowness issues that won't go away till you do a clean setup. Better off getting a new hard-drive, install Windows on that and use your original one as a secondary drive for backups.

Agreed.

When you install Windows to a new drive you shouldn't install that secondary drive until you have Windows installed and updated on the boot drive. I've done the same multiple times and have 5 storage devices which all were at one time or another were boot drives(except for one), including one from a laptop.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/20530/windows-10-reactivating-after-hardware-change along with https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 may be relevant to your situation.