BleepingComputer.com: Using A Dell Hard Drive On A Non Dell Machine

I'm running on an IBUYPOWER desktop, and I have this Dell that I blew the GPU out of a couple years ago. The Dell would work nominally had I not stripped the RAM, sound card, and PSU and replaced the GPU . Anyway I've had no problems using any of the parts on other computers except for the hard drive. When I hooked up the dell hard drive which had XP as the OS to my MoBo as a secondary hard drive. The main drive is running Vista. alot of the files were missing, and when I hooked it up to my MoBo as the main harddrive when I tried to boot up I would get a message(I'm not exactly for sure what the message said) but it was something to the point of my computer not being a Dell and the hard drive being a Dell and it wasn't compatible. Any solutions on how to remove whatever proprietary block Dell has put on their hard drives?

Format the drive.

Every boxmaker puts their "brand" on hard drives, it can be removed via formatting.

FWIW: Dell and every other boxmakers buy the same hard drives we do. They just install their own CMOS software, etc. on the drive.

Of course, if you want anything that was on the drive...remove it before formatting .

Louis

On the motherboard there is a chip called a EEPROM which contains the BIOS and the CMOS is a part of the BIOS and has nothing to do with the hdd.

One of the problems you are facing is taking a hdd from one computer and using it in another computer, this generally is a bad idea as the registry has key IDs that if introduce to another motherboard will not be the same and will confuse the OS trying to find the proper old IDs and the new one of the second motherboard. Wiping the hdd and reinstalling the OS is usually the best way to got, in the rare occasion you might get by with a repair.

Thanks, DC, for the correction .

I must have been tired or in a hurry to watch the Australian Open Women's Final...I didn't mean to state what I did.

Louis

Alright so how do I wipe the HDD if I can't use it with my computer to wipe it?

No one said that the drive cannot be wiped.

Some comments were made based on your assertion that you attempted to just use the O/S on the Dell hard drive...on a totally different system as a boot drive.

If that is not what you want to do, the drive can be wiped anytime by using an XP CD to delete existing partitions and format/create a new partition. Or you can use any number of programs that will just obliterate whatever is currently on the drive.

In fact, if you have the drive attached as a secondary drive booting XP or Vista, you ought to be able to simply go into Disk Management and do these things.

Louis

Wiping a hdd and reformatting it are two different things. If you reformat a hdd it will only remove the address to the files, wiping the hdd with a utility like KillDisk to wipe the drive it will overwrite everything on the hdd. The advantage of wiping the hdd is that if you have an infection it will be gone afterwards where as a reformat may not get rid of it.

The HDD is dead.(thread closed)