Switching Hard Drives

[Gammahooch13]

I was wondering since I have a Dell 15 inch laptop with a 1TB hard drive and My Alienware Alpha has a 500GB hard drive can I switch these two? They both are both laptop hard drives and both have Windows 10 on them just making sure that I can do this.

 

[thx1138v2]

Different motherboards, different peripherals, different graphics require different drivers. So you can probably swap them but you'll have to re-install the OS to get the proper drivers loaded for their new locations.

 

[10tacle]

Physically you can if they are both 9.5mm in height (and they should be). Your biggest barrier will be having to deal with Microsoft since each license is assigned to that laptop from the factory (unless you bought your own OEM copies of Win10 for each with which you are free to move them around wherever). Do you have reinstall disks from the factory for each or do you have your own OEM copies for each?

Just bear in mind you will have to go through a lot of driver updates and changes if you do a simple swap. I would just back up each drive, wipe them out with a reformat, and reinstall the swapped drives with each original Win10 license. You will not only not have to deal with MS if the software was installed at the factory. but not deal with driver conflicts and errors with each OS freaking out what happened to the hardware it was used to supporting.

 

[jsmithepa]

In a perfect world, everything is swap-able, and the software self-configures for the new environment. Ha! we wish.

 

[Gammahooch13]

Physically you can if they are both 9.5mm in height (and they should be). Your biggest barrier will be having to deal with Microsoft since each license is assigned to that laptop from the factory (unless you bought your own OEM copies of Win10 for each with which you are free to move them around wherever). Do you have reinstall disks from the factory for each or do you have your own OEM copies for each?

Just bear in mind you will have to go through a lot of driver updates and changes if you do a simple swap. I would just back up each drive, wipe them out with a reformat, and reinstall the swapped drives with each original Win10 license. You will not only not have to deal with MS if the software was installed at the factory. but not deal with driver conflicts and errors with each OS freaking out what happened to the hardware it was used to supporting.

I have both OEM copies I have one from dell and I made one through alienware respawn and both of them are usbs. How would I go through with the swap?

 

[10tacle]

I have both OEM copies I have one from dell and I made one through alienware respawn and both of them are usbs. How would I go through with the swap?

Hmmm. Not sure about that one you made via Alienware and whatever that "respawn" program is. Sounds to me like that's more of a restore for that Alienware laptop than an entire OEM copy you can slap on a different HDD into another laptop.

You might want to check from Dell's support if both are actual fully licensed OEM copies to reload from a completely wiped out hard drive. Just tell them you are wiping out the HDD for each and want to reload everything from scratch.

If they are full OEM copies, then all you do is wipe out each HDD entirely with a full reformat and swap them. Then load the OEM OS for each laptop that was originally assigned, download and install all the drivers for each laptop from Dell's support page, and then restore your file folders from whatever external sources you backed them up to. (It's not a short process on one computer, let alone two).