Newbie here
My desktop is 3-4 years old. The mother BOARD and the power unit have quit.
I replaced the mother board only to find the power supply not going.
The Hard Drive has all our family pics on it.
Can i simply transfer the existing hard drive into a new tower?It can be DONE, does the HDD have the OS on it? If not, what are you using, XP? A bit more info will help, as in what are you trying to put it in, your computer info. The guys on here need a lot of information to help properly.You may want to hook the old hard drive as a slave to the new system and save your data files. THEN you can reformat the drive and use the full capacity of it.

If you just put the old hard drive by itself in a new system it will work poorly, if at all because all of the motherboard components for the old system were included in the Windows INSTALLATION, and none of the new ones. A fresh INSTALL is always best for Windows. What version are we talking about?

Again, this makes the case that a hard drive is NOT a safe place to store vital information. They all die eventually.