Formatting hard drives

Hi,

If I formatted a hard drive in a computer and then moved the drive to another computer with the same os, would it work properly in that computer.

 

if you just format the drive then it will be ok - if you add an operating system as well then the chances are that it won't work

 

I'm not sure what you meant.

The drive is in a computer that has XP Pro x64. I want to move it to another computer that will have XP Pro x64. It's not completely built yet. The drive won't be Drive C. The drive that I want to put in the computer will be Drive D and will contain video files. I want to make sure it will work because the mobo, cpu, etc, are different.

 

sorry -
formating a drive is effectivly deleting the the current file system and creating a fresh one,

eg. if you have a drive that is formated to FAT32 and you want to change it to NTFS, xp will remove all the data in the format,
if its already NTFS and you re-format to NTFS you will still loose all your data,

after you format the drive then you can install the operating system,

if the drive in computer A is a slave drive and you just install the drive as a slave drive in computer B, then there should be no problems - there is also no need to format

 

Hey Denise,

It should work fine. I format drives all the time and stick em in other pc's

 

If the C drive is NTFS it will have no problem reading FAT or FAT32 volumes weather they were formatted on another computer or not. Good luck

 

So do I, Denise. As long as the HD you're moving doesn't have an OS on it then it will be recognized just fine in the new PC - which you say already has an OS.

 

Hi Guys. . . . thanks for your answers. It's good to know in advance that the new pc won't "reject" the drive because it has different "specifications" put on it during the format . . . learn something new everyday.

I know that a format wipes everything clean but they're new drives, hence the need to format them in order to put files on them. I'm not sure if all drives are the same, but these drives aren't recognized by My Computer until they're formatted.

It's good to "see" you again ibbonkers and Yargwel and that you know what I'm looking for when I ask a question