Can I swap hard drive between two identical PCs and keep all installed programs and OS intact?

I have two Dell Precision T7600 desktop computers. I have all my programs installed on PC1 using Windows 10 OS. If I swap the hard drive, will all the installed programs, OS (Windows 10 and Ubuntu) as well as drivers work on PC2?

Do I need to reinstall drivers for webcam, spectrum analyzer, etc. that I never used on PC2?

Specifications: Processor: Intel (R) Xeon (R) CPU E5-2630 0 @ 2.30GHz 2.30GHz RAM: 16 GB OS: Windows 10

N.B. The OS is a licensed version that my university offers to current students.

4 Answers

I'd probably start by pointing out that your licence may not allow you to swap the disks. Assuming you have a retail edition, and you have the right hardware drivers for PC2 (or they're fundamentally identical), it should work. Things like architecture (single processor vs multiprocessor, intel vs amd) matter, but these should be the same for the same model.

At most you'd have to reactivate. I wouldn't recommend routinely swapping drives between machines for that reason but the system would likely boot up at least far enough to log in and check.

Swapping drives between two PCs, usually not identically spec'd, has worked for me consistently with ArchLinux and with Windows 7, 8, and 10. Windows XP has given me issues. The one thing that occurs when doing this is that Windows will go through a "repair" process prior to booting to the desktop on its first boot upon swapping. You will also want to make sure you have a record of the product key for your computer, be it through your Windows COA on your case or elsewhere, to reactivate on your new desktop.

It will work, but you might have problems reactivating the Windows license. I've done it lots of times with Windows XP and Windows 7, but never with Windows 10. If you have any PCI cards, you'll get best results if they are in identical slots. If you have MS Office installed, you'll need to reactivate that license as well.

Ubuntu should give you no problems at all.

Ubuntu should work, but windows will get you blue screen of death.but Windows would need to be reactivated.

You don't need to reinstall drivers on Ubuntu it will install drivers automatically if needed.

If you have an extra license, you can reactivate Windows on PC2, but even if computer are identical, I would go with official way of transferring OS to another computer by using sysprep