I am on a old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop at the moment.

The chassis is dry rotting, pieces of plastic break off everywhere. Anyways, just now, I was feeling the right side and was wondering what was this little expansion port, pulled it out, rahtid, it was the hard drive, not screwed down. I observe the computer still running Windows XP without the boot drive installed, the mouse was moving, I clicked on a text in notepad and only tried to scroll sideways, it bar scrolled but there was a lack of update within the frame, I did not want to corrupt anything so I left it. Google chrome was open with quite a few pages, JDownloader 2 was opened but not downloading, and notepad was open.
I took out the drive completely, observe the drive, felt it, it was quite hot, observed the make, looked at the sata, and then inserted it in with a quick push. For the first few seconds I clicked on the start button and nothing, after that the start button responded and everything responded, I only closed the notepad file to be safe. Up to now, chrome is still running

Basically, the sata drive was as plug and play friendly like a thumb drive. I am really surprised that windows did not crash at all. I wonder how long I could have had it out