Our 4 year old Gateway FX400XL desktop with two 250GB, 7200RPM Serial ATA hard drives recently quit booting up.Windows 7 Ultimate(beta and then RC)was 32 bit OS with a dual boot for XP on one partitioned drive and Win 7 on the other. No problems with Windows 7 or the dual boot.We need the data off the Win 7 drive and want to move the drive to a Dell with Intel Xeon CPU, an empty Serial ATA slot, with Windows 7 Ultimate (same image as the Gateway's).Can we remove drive from dead one and plug it into the Dell with success? Is any preparation necessary, like sysprep?Please help! Thanks.

If you're only wanting to get the data off, then sure, no problems since you already have a bootable drive and the BIOS already has the info on which drive is bootable. Now don't forget you may have to go into bios to enable that 2nd drive (just don't change the boot order). This is where drive docks come in real handy to get data off of hard drives (and they are cheap at around $35).So did I misunderstand that all you want to do is get the data off those drives from the failed machine?MCSE, MCSA, MCDST

Yes if you only would like to get the data on the hard disk, you can connect it to another computer as a second hard disk (unless it is corrupted).