Tried to do a complete system reset on my old laptop but later decided to swap out the hdd for a new one. Will this cause problems?

Question

I have a old laptop that I don't use anymore. I figured there was some problem with the hdd since it kept trying disk repair very often and was prone to crashes. Today, I took out the laptop and tried to do a system reset by choosing to delete everything. The process went on for a few minutes but then the power went out so it stopped(it was plugged in, the battery wasn't in). Now, the reset process starts after being turned on. I decided to ditch the whole reset idea and thought it'd be better to buy a new HDD/SSD for it.

Now, my question is, if I plug in another HDD with windows installed, will it boot into it or start the reset process again? Or is that entirely dependent on the HDD?

Answer 1

Install an empty drive into your laptop and install windows.

The "repair/recovery" is linked to the hard drive, so a new drive will remove the issues. Not to say you cant have issues, but they wont be related to the old issues.

You don't necessarily need a new drive, if all data on your laptop drive is irrelevant (or relevant files are backed up externally), you can boot your laptop using the windows installation media and when asked where you want to install you can delete all existing partitions listed and let windows re-initialize/format the drive.

If your issues were caused by corrupt files etc this will fix it, if your drive is physically failing then it probably wont and will require a new drive.

Now, my question is, if I plug in another HDD with windows installed, will it boot into it or start the reset process again? Or is that entirely dependent on the HDD?

If you have a drive from another system with windows already installed and put it into your laptop, it MIGHT work but its likely to complain a lot so would not recommend it.