Hard drive switch

I have an Acer Aspire 5050 with an 80gb hard drive. I am building a new computer and I wont be able to afford a new HDD until next month. I want to put the hard drive in my laptop into this new build without reinstalling windows. The new computer has a Radeon HD 7770 and my laptop has a Radeon x1100 express with catalyst. Will there be any driver conflicts or anything that will break the OS? The OS installed is Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

Reinstall the OS, because things will break.

Oh, alright . I wanted to avoid that, too much time. I'll reinstall, thanks for the advice. Theoretically though, would there be any catalyst driver conflicts?

There would be conflicts with all kinds of drivers. Starting with the storage ones, that might render the OS unbootable. There would surely be conflicts between the Catalyst ones.

This is why I hate that nothing is standardized. My idealist half says keep everything the same, but my programming side is there curled up in a corner making funny noises because of the sheer complexity of it.

Well there are things you can do to make the drive movable, but the complexity of that as a first-timer might out weigh the time to RE-install. And the problem of possible not booting. In that case you would be much better to back-up any data you need and do the RE-install. Six of one and yes a half dozen of the other.

I think I could manage it, I know my way around Windows and it's subsystems quite well. The issue is that I have never attempted it and I didn't know if it was worth the effort.

This looks interesting. I'll be watching this thread.

Well, I may be masochist, but I guess i could use a challenge. I wont be able to start until Thursday though. The laptop's OS has been installed for around a year with heavy use, so I expect there to be quite a bit of drivers already installed for the various parts. The laptop specs:
Acer Aspire 5050
1.8ghz Turion 64 X2 (upgrade, not stock)
4Gb Ram (ddr2)
Radeon Xpress 1100 gpu (Catalyst 12.1 if I am not mistaken)
Atheros 5k Wireless (not sure of the model and I don't have my laptop with me)
My new computer's specs:
Intel i5 3570k
16Gb (4x4Gb) G.Skill Ripjaws Z DDR3 2133 Ram
Radeon HD 7770 gpu
Asus P8Z77-V LK Motherboard
Rosewill RNX-G1 A-Typr USB 2.0 wireless adapter (realtek chipset)

I have tested all of my peripherals such as my mouse, keyboard, headset, etc... on my laptop, so there should be no driver conflicts there. I'm going to uninstall the Catalyst drivers before I swap the HDD and reinstall them off of the driver disc because I don't have internet where I am going to build. That is probably going to make this so much harder, but I cant help it. If I can find a camera, I'm going to do a build log/tutorial/case review with my parts; I'm going to add this to it if I can. With these few days downtime, are there any suggestions on what else to modify/uninstall before I build and swap?

you could use a disk manager like paragon to split your current disk in 1/2 then do a dual boot for a different machine on it. the only downside is you might erase the wrong copy of windows when you go to fix it unless you only gave it like 50GB or something you could easily remember.


anyways just a though.

I can't do that, the hard drive is 80Gb and about 50Gb is used

An update to those interested, I had a delay and I will have time to build and test everything tomorrow. Before I swap, I'm going get device manager to show disconnected devices and take out the unneeded ones, then uninstall Catalyst and the video card drivers manually. With the similarities in hardware I shouldn't have to worry about other conflicts, but I guess we will see .