A common question I am sure. Most of my searches have centered around moving Hard Drives with XP to a Vista based machine as a slave or a master or XP to XP. But I have not found much on Vista to Vista.

I'd like to take my current Hard Drive and put it in my new machine which is basically just a new motherboard and Ram. Keeping other parts. Can the hard drive be used as the master without re formatting? 

Can it be used as a slave without re formatting?

My new motherboard will have SATA connections on the back... can I use the old hard drive that way to pull data off if I have to buy a new HD?

Any thoughts appreciated.so far during my experiences with vista moving the harddrive to new hardware works the same as with xp. i have recently moved my harddrive and CPU to a new motherboard, PSU, and case and it started up just fine with the exception of having to install chipset drivers.If you're planing on running Vista on the hard drive from the old computer you should reinstall once the hdd is installed in the new machine.
Windows doesn't like major hardware changes and it was never designed to be moved between two different machines. (Actually it has features designed to prevent just that.)
If you're just want to use it as a slave I STILL recommend you FORMAT it as it will still contain all the Vista system files and boot INFORMATION (the boot information can only be removed by formatting the drive).

QUOTE from: BobPCBuilder on March 19, 2008, 03:38:34 PM

My new motherboard will have SATA connections on the back... can I use the old hard drive that way to pull data off if I have to buy a new HD?