Will connecting another computer's boot drive to my main PC mess it up

I have an old Windows 7 laptop that has been acting up. I want to take its boot drive and hook it up to my main Windows 10 desktop via USB just to explore the drive and see if it appears to have data on and if it appears to be corrupted. If everything looks ok, I'd plan on putting it back into my laptop and then troubleshooting more from there. It seems like I'd read somewhere that connecting a boot drive in this way could mess something up so that it wouldn't boot correctly anymore.

Any truth to that?

Thanks.

As long as you don't boot with the corrupted drive you will be okay.

Thanks for the quick response. I didn't think it would hurt it, but I didn't want to make matters worse. I think the drive is going.

When I tried to boot the laptop, it says no OS is found, check drive cable. The cable was plugged in correctly and firmly, but BIOS wasn't seeing the drive at all. When I connect it to my desktop, it spins up ok and I can see data on the drive. When I connect an old spare SSD to the laptop in this one's place, BIOS sees it OK, so I'm thinking it's the drive.

I think I'm going to install Windows 7 on this old 60GB SSD and use it as a boot drive. It should do just fine. It's not like I use this laptop very often. I use it mainly for convenience when I want to do something I can't do from my tablet while sitting on my rear in front of the television. I also use it at work occasionally to remote in to my main desktop using TeamViewer, since TeamViewer Portable stopped letting me sign in to my home computer from my work PC. After three years, it just suddenly started picking it up as commercial use.

Anyway, thanks again for your help.

CrystalDiskInfo is a very helpful, easy to use S.M.A.R.T. tool which gives you all the necessary information about the hard drive health.

CrystalDiskInfo – Crystal Dew World

Thanks again. I'll give it a try.

This particular drive is a 10+ year-old, 120GB 5400RPM laptop HDD, and probably isn't worth worrying about, but the tool will come in handy in the future.

You are very welcome!