Posted by Emuz
Windows is not like a Unix Variant.. it does not play well when you try to transplant it.. so take it one step at a time and keep the possible pitfalls in mind!
I'd agree with this if W10 wasn't actually somewhat decent about this. I've had a lot of hard drive transplants work from one system to another so long as the operating system in question being used was this. Anything on back, not counting 8.x because I have little experience dealing with the OS for as trash it was in general, would be problematic but the above SHOULD work if that is the OS from the old unit.
If it's anything else then it will like blue-screen the minute you try to go into it, probably with a 0x7B STOP error or similar for not being able to mount the drive properly. It also depends on if the old machine with Legacy boot exclusively or if it had UEFI like most new ones use for boot. If you have Legacy on the old drive, it's still possible that you might be able to boot from it but you would have to disable Secure Boot from the BIOS and allow for the Legacy Boot ROM to be enabled, which is not recommended for security reasons but might get what you're looking to do from this.
Short of that, I'm not entirely certain. I'd need more information based on the above to know if it would work for you with absolute certainty but I've seen it done before, depending on what your old drive's configuration was and what it was out of.