Swapping computers

[J1mmy]

I might be swapping computers with my brother, which means I would want to basically take his PC, take out his HD's and put in mine.

Is it this simple, or are there other things involved. I have a total of 3 HD's 2 of which are in RAID 0, the other which has the OS on it.

As for him, he will be doing the same thing but simply putting in his own HD into my machine

[GroundZero3]

You will probably run into os issues if you are going to try just boot up to your old drives. A fresh install will be in order for both machines espically if they have different hardware. As for your raid, that will not transfer over (and you need to check if his computer even supports raid)

Simply moving the os drive to another computer hardly ever works

[J1mmy]

It's a pretty similar spec PC to mine of not better.

So does that mean that everytime someone wanted to replace a motherboard on their machine, they would have to do a fresh reinstall?

[Mickwish]

Depends on the hardware involved. And what OS. Windows is not very forgiving when changing hardware that involves drivers, such as chipsets. Linux is much better at this. But RAID is very dependent upon the setup of the RAID array, which is tied into the hardware involved. Most times you cannot even see a RAID if you chnage the drives to a different motherboard even if it does support RAID.

Another trap is changing hardware that is similar and then not updating drivers. This can have some weird effects, like random crashes, which can be almost impossible to troubleshoot. Best option is a clean install if different hardwae is involved.

Cheers
Mick