Will swapping a hard drive save the current os on the old hard drive?

[incomsquadron]

i know the wording on my title sounds weird so heres some clarification. i Had a 160 GB HDD in my old HP 8000 SFF and im going to be swapping it out for a 250GB blank HDD. the 160 GB currently has ubuntu installed on it and i am planning to install windows 7 on the new 250 GB drive. My question is instead of burning the recovery disks for my ubuntu OS, would removing the 160GB drive save all the info so that reinstalling it later would contain all my info for the ubuntu OS ( basically treating the drive as a recovery disk set). if so, id rather just keep the drive unaltered than waste time burning a disk set for the OS. Hope this makes sense.

 

[AdamKatsaras]

Yes it would. When you disconnect a hard drive, they data on it won't be deleted. However, you might need to reformat it when putting it in a new compatible computer along with the correct cables, but usually you don't need to reformat it. I have taken out a 500gb hard drive of an old computer and put it in my new computer and all the data on it was available to me.