My dell laptop has a broken power button so I am not able to turn on my laptop. I still have warranty on the laptop so Dell wants me to send it out to them to fix it...however, there's one problem. I have some sensitive personal data saved on the laptop that I would not want to be compromised that was saved on the desktop of my old laptop. So my question is this: just to be safe, would it be possible to buy a brand new computer of the same make, model, etc, take out the hard drive from my old laptop, and put it in the new laptop, and thus transfer the data. Will the new computer boot up with the old hard drive, and will my data still be there?
12 Answers
Yes... As long as you get a new laptop that is identical, or almost identical, placing the hard drive from computer A into computer B it will be as if it was computer A, except a new laptop.
Minor difference would be OK, like original had 4GB of RAM and new one has 8GB of RAM. As long as the core hardware is identical (CPU, chipsets, GPU, etc), it will work fine.
6If the only concern is the sensitive data, you could simply buy a sata-to-usb adapter pull the drive on the broken computer and plug into a different computer. If the data was on your desktop you'd find the files (depending on your windows version) in c:\users[your user name]\desktop. Delete or copy them, replace the hard drive in the broken computer and send to Dell with no worries.
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