Can I just swap hard drives between computers?

I recently swapped hard drives between two computers as an easy way to transfer all of my data between them, and I want to keep the two drives swapped.

1. You can't take a hard drive with an installed operating system on it > put it in another device and expect it to boot into Windows.

Yes, it's just like cloning a failing drive. You may have some basic settings to adjust but it will work just fine.

The old hard drive works fine in new machine, just do fresh install of windows7 in new hard drive inside old machine and activate using OEM product key.

Just boot off your current working drive and then access the old drive like a secondary / slave data disk. Shouldn't have any trouble. The only ...

This is perfectly OK. We do it frequently. Some points to bear in mind: Only swap when the OS is really shutdown. Not hibernated !

Trying to replace a hard drive in a Windows 10 machine with a hard drive from a functioning windows 7 machine. Thought I could just install the win 7 HD in the ...

The easy answer is NO and due to operating system software, it is unique to each specific hard disk. Whenever a hard drive is installed on any ...

You can take a bootable hard drive w/ Windows on it from machine A and put into an empty machine B as the primary and only hard drive.

If you run sysprep on the drive with Windows 7 before migrating it you should be be able to move it and boot from it on the other computer. You ...