Black screen of death on HDD just after moving it to a new PC?

[DougMacArthur]

I bought a new PC recently with Windows 10 on an SSD, but it is relatively low capacity and I wanted to keep my old computer "as it was" by just moving the hard drive over to the new PC and then choosing which to boot from at start up.

Nothing went wrong with the transfer except that there was no bay for the hard drive in the new PC so it has to sit loosely in the chassis in a region with no other components. I was able to boot from the SSD fine and even access the old hard drive's files from it. Then last night i tried to boot from the old hard drive and it did a disk check. Then it tried to boot from the SSD again so I restarted and tried again. This time it logged in and started loading things and I went to the bathroom, when I came back it was loading from the SSD and I have no idea why.

This morning I tried again but it did another check disk. Then it started changing the security ID file by file to the default, but I still couldn't log in after. At this point I can't even access the files anymore from the SSD OS and where it would normally display storage capacity for the drive it just says "NTFS." Now I can boot the hard drive without it running through a disk check and it will even show the Safe Mode options screen but no matter the option I choose I get a black screen with just a cursor and for some reason inputs (like mouse and keyboard) no longer function unless I restart.

Anyone know what is going on or how to fix it? This hard drive worked flawlessly even after the transfer.

 

[USAFRet]

I bought a new PC recently with Windows 10 on an SSD, but it is relatively low capacity and I wanted to keep my old computer "as it was" by just moving the hard drive over to the new PC and then choosing which to boot from at start up.

Moving a drive and its OS from one system to another and hoping it just boots up is a false hope.

And often, trying that screws both drives.

 

[DougMacArthur]

Moving a drive and its OS from one system to another and hoping it just boots up is a false hope.

And often, trying that screws both drives.

Why? I was under the impression an operating system is self-contained in whatever it is stored in and only interacts with outside hardware. Am I wrong in that or is it just that transferring a hard drive is hit-or-miss as to whether or not it works?

And does that mean I won't be able to recover the hard drive? Would I at least be able to salvage the data on it?

 

[USAFRet]

Why? I was under the impression an operating system is self-contained in whatever it is stored in and only interacts with outside hardware. Am I wrong in that or is it just that transferring a hard drive is hit-or-miss as to whether or not it works?

And does that mean I won't be able to recover the hard drive? Would I at least be able to salvage the data on it?

Yes, the OS is "self contained" on that drive.
But is it somewhat specific to the original system at a much deeper level.

Moving a drive like that has 3 outcomes:
1. It boots up just fine
2. It fails to boot completely
3. It boots up, but you have lingering issues later.

I've seen all 3.

I've even seen it fail between 2 almost identical laptops.
And work between 2 very different desktops.
There is absolutely no 100% 'it always works', when moving an OS drive between systems.