Hardware Moving HD to another PC

Hi,

A couple of question first of all:

1, what is the old pc operating system?
2, can you still access the old data?

Both PCs are Win 7.

On the old pc (Dell), it can still access the data on the original HD as well as the cloned HD.

On the newer pc (HP Pavilion), the cloned HD will not boot or repair.

After Windows 98 a security feature was that the Hardware Abstraction Layer would not rebuild by default on another machine. "Please insert volume labelled WIN98 in any drive" remember that?

Acronis claims to be able to make an image that will do this but I and the IT guy at work have not managed to get it to work. I wanted a full installed image to deploy to any hardware.

You might have to do something with Sysprep to get it to work.

Sysprep only works in certain circumstances too. And you can only run it a certain number of times (3?).

It'll do no harm to try, just make sure to set the Shutdown Options to shutdown rather than the default reboot.

I used acronis to take an image of toshiba xp and put on samsung win 7
Worked perfect just needed to change drivers.
And partition size if hdd is different.

Hi mate

Simple answer to your question is, you can’t swap a hdd fromone computer to another, both systems will have different hardware and thesystem will crash or you will experiencethe B,S,O,D

might be convenient to keep old os and data, but will not work as quickly as a new install and be more unstable if it even works.

Win7 is fairly tolerant to hardware changes but it really does depend on how different they are. For example going from AMD to Intel is less likely to work then say going from a Sandy Bridge to Haswell (something i did this weekend).

If it isn't booting then I would honestly say that its almost certainly going to be less hassle to backup your data and re-install your O/S and software then trying to recover the O/S. As a bonus you get to start from fresh.

You could potentially fix the problem with sysprep but its a lot of hassle and no guarantees that it will work.

Backing up documents, data etc isnt too bad its when clients have accountancy packages and other specialist software that require installing again and clients loose their CDs and activation codes. As you say, not much option but do a fresh install.

DON'T do a fresh install....

This can be done quite easily. You need to download the ide/achi/sata drivers for the motherboard in the new pc, then inject them.

Full instructions can be found here
h..p://www.dowdandassociates.com/blog/content/howto-repair-windows-7-install-after-replacing-motherboard/

Simples