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can I swap hard drives out on 2 different hp pavilions?

my Pavilion was a ZD8000, but the motherboard fried on it, my girlfriend has a ZT3000 I want to switch out the hard drives, so I can get my stuff off the other one both were running XP, can I do this swap?

Public Comments

1. I think so. Same brand, shouldn't be a problem.
2. yes you can, when you pull the hard drive out you will see the cable that connects the hard drive to the mother board...its called an IDE cable, there will also be a power cable for electricity....also you will see the exact same cables on the 2nd pc....the connections will look exactly the same...just unhook then and swap them out....you might have to undo some screws to to take the hard drive out you might have to install some programs called drivers... for instance the sound card on the old pc might be differenet than then new pc...you can download the drivers for free off hp's website...
3. You can't. If you swap, chances are you won't be able to get into Windows. This is because the drivers for each laptop are specific and the laptop cannot run without them. These drivers reside on the hard disk. Different Pavilion models will have different hardware. If you want to get the data out from your old disk, buy a cheap external hard disk case and install that hard disk in there. Then you can connect your hard disk by USB to your girlfriends laptop and get out the stuff.