Can I easily transfer a hard drive to another computer?

I have a pc with Win. 2000 Professional on a G6-333 Gateway 2000, and I would like to put the HDD in a Compaq Presario with Pentium III. But I worry that it might create some kind of schock b/c of change in hard ware.

Also, would it be possible to compy the contents to another Hard drive using free or cheap software?

 

Are you use just adding the drive for storage? Or would you be replacing the boot drive on the computer you will be installing the new drive into? As for causing conflicts, as long as all the jumpers are set correctly for master/slave adding a new hard drive is a simple procedure. Windows should read the drive no problem.

 

I attempted to transfer a hard drive to an more advanced computer, but it did not work. I kept getting a message "the following configuration was updated automatically" (something along those lines). And it had something about the floppy, cd, and DVD drive. It kept doing that repeatedly, and eneventually booted up and could not find the operating system.