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I am planning to upgrade my hardware from Dell Precision T3400 to T3500. Is it possible to bring OS HDD from T3400 and put it in T3500 and finish the upgrade? Can Windows XP auto detect hardware change without breaking anything? Please advise, thanks.

Spec:
T3400
Intel®  Core™2 Quad
X38 Express chipset
4G RAM


T3500
Intel® Xeon® Quad Core W3550
X58 Express chipset
4G RAM
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2 Answers

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Windows is good at detecting hardware changes, but when you change the chipset, it tends to kill XP with the lovely BSOD at boot. When XP installs it installs files based around the chipset, so switching chipsets is not recommended. You can always try a repair after, but there is no guarantee it will work. BACK UP YOUR DATA FIRST.

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In my opinion, Windows XP sucks at detecting hardware changes. Removing all drivers from the system before the swap might work, because then it has to rely on the generic ones. Though, I'm not sure if Windows does install any drivers at installation time specific to the hardware. – Bobby Mar 4 '11 at 10:04
In my decade of supporting hundreds of windows machines, I've never not had one detect even a minor hardware change. It installs a lot specific to the hardware at install, it has to, any OS has to. – MaQleod Mar 4 '11 at 13:53
Not necessarily. AFAIK the Linux kernel is absolutely modular and can load modules on demand (read: at boot). My system booted without any problems after migrating from an AMD based mainboard to an Intel one. But the situation has impressively improved with Windows 7...we shouldn't compare Windows XP anymore to modern operating systems. – Bobby Mar 7 '11 at 21:24
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You could install the required drivers for your new system before you swap the HDD and then on the upgrade Windows will have the drivers for the chipset on boot.
You could uninstall the drivers just before swap out to make sure the PC is looking for drivers on first boot and will detect the correct ones.

The most common XP BSOD on computer swap is due to the SATA drivers being incorrectly set to AHCI in BIOS.

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