With a bunch of caveats, yes, it is possible by copying
directories,subdirectories, etc. Actually it's possible to "clone" the whole
HD as one form of backup as insurance.
At least large hard drives are cheap these days. I can remember when a 40Meg
HD was $400. (And, 7Meg per disk Minicomputer HD's were over 10 grand. )
A major complication has to do with registry entries for applications.
There are ways to do this via a repair sequence, using various utilities.,
including Linux based uitilities.
The last time I got into this, I ended up using a HD USB to PATA interface
to connect the old hard drive to the new system.
Considerations,etc.
Obviously the new system's registry and probably the "HAL" are going to be
different. It is difficult to do a registry manual edit merge without
screwing something up.
OEM versions require a bit more care when they are "Branded".
Backup everything before you start. It also gets more complicated if the new
computer has a SATA drive.
Make sure that you have an installable copy of any drivers, etc for the new
system, in case you screw it up, and need to use a generic windows CD to
recover.
"Virgin" <Virgin@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:68D38A61-F808-4062-A0E0-B1031D34B649@microsoft.com...
> Is there any way of tranferring the files and settings from a hard drive
> of
> which the motherboard has fried to a new pc without having to have to
> tranfer
> files individually? The new pc's bios would obviously not be the same as
> the
> old pc, so I can't just pop the old HDD into the new one. Both systems are
> running XP Home. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks