Reusing a used Hard Drive

If I were to take a hard drive out of my laptop and place it into another one of my laptops (assuming its the same brand/model or atleast similar; ) would it boot up using the preloaded OS?

I want to know because I have a laptop with a burnt out hard drive (or what I think is the issue) and I wanted to make sure that buying a new hard drive would be the right fix by testing it first with a used one.

No, but what you can do is run a livecd and the drive to test it.

It runs Ubuntu just fine using the current HD, but it will not run windows anymore.

Then its got to be the os install.

But I tried reinstalling windows with no luck, a couple of the members here, including richard, suggested hardware, specifically hard drive.

If ubuntu runs, than windows too.

Did you reformat back to ntfs, and your media good?

Or is it the *nix cd ran.. not a *nix hd install?

Using a hard drive that hasn't been acquainted with the computer's hardware drivers have caused errors in the past. If you can't install Windows on a hard drive or the hard drive is incompatible with that version of Windows. To me, it sounds like it's because of potential bad sector(s) on the drive. Are you able to run it as a slave drive? You could do what Patonb suggests and then reformat it to NTFS.

For me, it's always trial and error, if I am able to get the display to appear when I stick in a used hard drive into a different computer, I am usually able to get it functioning and fully operational somehow.

@thetroubleshoot is right, it just has bad sectors.

@Patonb it installed completely onto the HD and was used as a normal OS for a week or so, but I didn't like the OS so I just put the laptop away.

My media was good and the files were all intact.

I didn't reformat it to NTFS though? whats the point of that.

By chance and only chance there is a possibility that a NTFS reformat could overwrite or at least 'workaround' the bad sectors allowing you to install Windows or another operating system. It's worked for me 25/75, but it's always fun to flip a quarter. :D

Awesome. I'll try using the used hard drive and see what happens, might as well learn while I have the chance to. If it doesn't work, I'll just start with the NTFS format thing.