Using old hard disks in new system

[hjazz6]

Hi,

I'm going to buy a new system, and I have 2 SATA hard disks from my old
system. One is installed with a Linux OS, the other with Windows
Vista.

For the Linux hard disk, will I be able to simply use these 2 hard disks on the new system and boot up, retaining all my data? If not, how do I transfer the data from my old hard disks to my new hard disks? My old system is faulty (no signal to monitor), so I can't just copy everything directly using, say, a portable hard disk.

Thank you.

Regards,
Rayne

[MikeTbob]

It really depends on how you set your system up, did you have a separate /home partition? What I would do is: Get your new system and put the old drives in it....boot from a LiveCD and use that to mount, copy and transfer files. Then I would delete the old hard drives and re-install from scratch.

[hjazz6]

Can I just connect the old Linux hard disk to the new system, boot into the NEW linux hard disk and see the old hard disk like I would if I plug in a flash drive? Then copy the files over to the new disk?

[MikeTbob]

Sure you could, as long as you got something installed on the new drive.

[Rubberman]

My guess is that Windows won't boot since I think the more recent versions (Vista, Win7) are locked to the CPU that the system was installed on. You can try it anyway. As for Linux, as long as any installed driver modules don't cause a kernel panic when the hardware they are intended to control doesn't exist, then you should be OK. I mention this because I have seen some drivers cause the kernel to panic when they are loaded and try to initialize non-existent hardware. Drivers that are builtin to the kernel or are dynamically loaded when the hardware they control is detected, won't have this problem. So, the more "vanilla" your configuration is, the more likely you are to have a positive experience starting it up on a new system.