I'm the new administrator in an office network with a domain controller, a terminal SERVER and less than ten workstations all running XP. A workstation in a conference room has special HARDWARE (all USB) and software on it for presentations, but its chassis is too big to fit in the cabinetry. We've bought a new computer that has a smaller chassis and need to set up a new workstation for a new staff member. The hard drives in these two computers are nearly identical types -- both boxes are same-generation Dells (Optiplex 320 and 745).

I want to simply swap out the hard drives, so that the 'conference room' hard drive stays, although it will be in the new chassis. Then, I'll start to build up the new workstation with the new hard drive (400GB rather than 80) in the bulky older box (XP Pro pre-installed).

My first experimental step of converting the conference room box went better than I expected... almost effortlessly, so far. It had no trouble with the large wall-mounted display, and the EXTRA USB hardware (Hauppauge WinTV and Bluetooth keyboard and mouse) work fine. Of course, the ATI graphics chip that it's looking for on the main board is 'missing', and the system found many cases of "new hardware" (including the NIC). Unfortunately, I'm going to have to discern what the previous administrator's admin password was in order to fully address those. But, I'm optimistic.

The end of the day Friday HALTED my plans at that point. But, that gives me time for a little reflection and advice-seeking...

What sort of issues do you guys think I might FACE, regarding the computer identification, network connections... maybe even Windows license violations (Yikes!)?At minimum you are going to have to run a Repair Install of XP since the HDD came from another machine...
Done properly all your data and apps will be intact...
1 mistake and everything will be wiped but you will have a fresh XP install...so read carefully.

Then again you may get extremely lucky and the machine will boot fine...not likely though.

Best of Luck...Quote

...its chassis is too big to fit in the cabinetry.