Windows 7 – Swapping Hard Drives Between Identical PCs

drivershard drivehotswappingwindows 7

I currently work in 2 different locations, traveling between the 2 every few weeks or so. I currently have screens, kb, mouse etc… in both locations, so I just pick up my tower case when I want to move to the other location.

However to make moving easier I was thinking of buying 2 tower cases with hot swappable drive bays on the front and installing identical hardware in each one.

This would allow me to pull the drives out and just take them with me and plug them into the PC at the other location.

Would windows 7 complain? I'm not fussed about buying licenses for both PCs, but would I have any problems with drivers due to the different serial numbers of the components?

Update: 23rd Dec

So I went ahead with this and bought the 2 identical PCs and they are working beautifully, haven't had any problems when swapping drives. I've even upgraded the processor in one of them and not had any problems.

Best Answer

This is perfectly OK. We do it frequently.

Some points to bear in mind:

  • Only swap when the OS is really shutdown. Not hibernated !
  • If you installed ANY software during the last session (including hotfixes/security patches) give the computer an extra reboot, before shutting it down. This is to make sure all updates are really committed to the registry.
  • You can use different USB devices (Mouse, keyboard, and so on) as these are intended to be swapped anyway.
  • If the network-card allows setting your own mac-address it is a very good idea to set it to the same value on BOTH systems. Use the value of one of the adapters.
  • Minor differences in hardware (like a different CDROM drive, or a slightly different video-card as long as it uses the same drivers as the other one) are usually no problem. Motherboard chipset and CPU should be exactly identical. This prevents you from loosing the Windows product activation.
  • Microsoft frowns upon the practice, but you will only need 1 license for the OS.

In general: After swapping let the PC boot once while keeping it off the LAN. You don't want the PC to pull Windows Updates or any software phoning home to check product activation at that point.
Any hardware differences will be resolved by the OS.
Then reboot and reconnect LAN and you are good to go.

Windows 7 is more lenient than XP in this situation anyway. (More build-in drivers.)
Also: Windows in general seems not to throw a fit if you visualize physical hardware to a VM. The other way around can be quite problematic, especially it the target hardware is different than the original hardware from which the VM was build (or the VM was build as such and never existed as physical hardware).

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