Can I Move My Old Hard Drive to My New Computer to Transfer Data? (2024)

My recommendation.

You can take the internal hard disk of an old computer and install it as an additional drive in a new one, or consider a more flexible alternative.

Question: My sister has a computer with Windows. However, it is crashing on her. She got a new computer with the latest Windows. My question is, can she install her old hard drive onto her new PC so she can transfer her files over to her new hard drive? She is very illiterate when it comes to computers.

A working hard disk formatted for use by any prior version of Windows can certainly be read by Windows versions that come later.

Of course, you’ll have to open the old computer and extract the drive. Then you can either install it as an internal or external drive of the new machine.

Installing the drive in another machine

This is a fairly common approach if you’re comfortable dealing with hardware.

Remove the old hard drive from the old computer and install it as the second1drive in a new one. What used to appear as the C: drive on the old computer might now appear as the D: drive on the new one. Once it’s set up, copying files from old to new is easy and fast.

This approach comes with a bonus. Once you’re done copying the files you want to keep, you can leave the old hard drive in the new machine, reformat it (or not), and use the extra disk space for whatever you like.

The downside is you need to be somewhat hardware literate to install the drive. It does mean opening up your PC and connecting the old drive in the right way in the right place. How to do it varies based on the type of computer and hard disk you have.

A more flexible approach: the external drive

A more flexible approach I prefer is to take the drive out of the old computer and install it into an external USB drive enclosure.

That’s essentially what external USB drives are: hard drives in an enclosure, providing power and a circuit board to provide the USB-to-hard-drive interface.

There are two things you need to know before purchasing an external USB enclosure.

• The physical size of the drive. The external enclosure you select must match the physical size of the old drive you’re about to put in it.

In the photo above, the drive at the bottom is a 3.5-inch drive, the next up is a 2.5-inch drive, and the two circuit boards above are M.2 form factor drives. Each requires a different size and/or style of external enclosure.

• The interface.

There are two primary disk interfaces these days: SATA (on the left, above) and the newer M.2 (on the right). Almost all machines include SATA interfaces, whereas newer machines also include M.2 interfaces for SSDs in that form factor.

Once you’ve installed the drive in the appropriate type of enclosure (a screwdriver is the only tool you’ll need), you connect it via USB to any computer (and perhaps to power), and you’ll be able to access the data on it.

What you can’t do

I want to caution you about transferring software.

You can’t.

Any program that requires running a setup program to be installed on the old machine will need that setup program run again to install it on the new machine. This is not typically available on the hard disk you just moved — you’ll need to download the latest setup for the software you want2.

Similarly, this doesn’t work for Windows. Windows is configured for the specific hardware it’s used on. Your old machine’s configuration is different than your new machine’s. Even if you could copy it over somehow, it would be unlikely to work properly. Much like an application, Windows must be set up for the machine it will run on.