Depends who good Windows feels like acting for you. For example at work today I had 2 computers completely different systems. Had to transfer the information from one system to another. I cheated (as such) and just changed the HDD's (effectively same thing, different CPU etc).
One of these systems accepted the HDD and all I had to do was upgrade the drivers and off she went.
The second PC not so good
Windows was locked in a booting loop. I just reinstalled the OS. I guess I could have loaded into safe mode and tried to repair the OS etc but that HDD didn't have any information on it anyway.
If worse comes to worse and you have a second HDD, you could install Windows on that HDD and just copy over information (if that is what you are worried about) the formation the second HDD and use as storage or something.