Put my HDDs in another PC?

[Khaydarin]

I'm going home from school for Christmas Break in a week and a half, and since I'm flying I don't really want to bring my desktop home. However, I do want to bring my 3 hard drives home to use on one of our desktops. The desktop at home has one hard drive with Windows 7. The three hard drives are as follows: one has windows 7, and the other two are simply "storage" (music, games, etc).

If I put my three hard drives into the desktop at home, then would I have the option to boot into either version of Windows 7? If I booted into the "home-based" windows 7 hard drives, would I have any trouble accessing the information on the other drives? Is there anything I should know, should I attempt this?

Thank you very much!

 

[dbwillis]

unless the 'home pc' is exact same hardware as the 'school pc' then pluggin in the Win7 OS drive and trying to boot into it will :>
A - prob cause activation prompts (and reprompts when back at school)
B - cause BSOD if the chipsets are very very different (maybe needing a reinstall)
Just bring the 'storage' drives with you home, thos should come up in explorer as an additional drive, you might have to assign a drive letter by chance, using Disk Management

 

[williamlee]

If you need the W7 drive from school to use at home, you can add all 3 drives to the home PC, and go into the BIOS in the home PC to set the boot order among the hard drives. As long as you set the W7 home PC drive as the first in the boot list, you should be fine. It will boot from there and never get to your W7 drive's boot record, but you will still be able to view it under Windows.

 

[DarkSideA8]

I'm thinking of doing something similar (except as part of a re-build):

Will games loaded on my current HDD (on a non-OS partition) still be playable without having to uninstall / reinstall?

(Add'l info:

I'm installing a SSD to run Win 7 64 OS & key apps, and adding a new 1TB WD Caviar Black. Old OS is XP 32. Since I have some heavily patched games (like Witcher) & modded games (like M2TW & ETW) I'd rather not spend all the time installing & repatching if I can avoid it.

So, If I plug in the 200 GB drive used in my current system, can I just trigger the executable & play the game, or do they require a fresh install to work with a new OS?