interchangable hard drive

so, i recently accidentally destroyed my macbook pro. the hard rive is fine, however.

this was a 2007 santa rosa model. my question for you is...when i get a new macbook pro will i be able to pop in the old internal 500 gig drive into the new one and boot it up and everything will work ok?

if not, i do have time machine backups but they aren't quite as recent as i'd like them to be. if i have to restore from time machine i can and will but i would prefer to just boot up from the old hard drive if possible. thanks for your help!

Yes you can use it.
You can also clone it to the new MBP with CCC or Superduper and get an external enclosure and use it as an external drive, or use the external enclosure to put the HD that comes with the MBP and use that as the external drive.

To clarify, the HD should physically function fine in the new machine. However, I don't believe you will be able to simply turn it on and have the new machine boot off the OS from the original machine. OS X installations are model specific. Only the drivers needed for that particular hardware configuration are installed. Different chipsets, an improved video card, etc will all require different drivers which will not be installed on the old HD. You'll need to do a TM restore.

I have to disagree, not totally with what you are saying, but just based on the santa rosa and its specs and the intended conversion...... all will be good!