My laptop has smoked and I still need the hard drive. Can I simply take the hard drive (in which the entire operating system is installed) out of the laptop and connect it to my PC as normal and use it as a hard drive?
That depends on the laptop. As long as this is not a Macbook, everything should be fine. Remember, however, that you should uninstall the drivers before removing.
If Windows laptop: take out the disk, put it in the PC at a free SATA port, restart the PC. You should now see the drive in the BIOS, and then in Disk Management as well. There you can assign a drive letter to it.
Just to be on the safe side: the PC is of course switched off during installation.
:-) Can't be said often enough:-)
