Greetings. I had a refurbished HP DC7900 and the mobo failed. The SSD I had installed with W7 and some other software was fine, so I built a new machine with that SSD (and an MSI N3150I ECO mobo with an N3150 Quad Core processor).
I've never had this situation before. I know W7 is keyed to the hardware and you can't just slap the old drive in a new machine and go. But I expected there would be some path to re-entering a W7 key and getting new drivers installed.
When I booted it I got a BSOD STOP (went by too fast to see the number). Booted again and it went to startup repair. It scanned the system and then offered to do a restore to an earlier point. I know this would not work because it would restore to the old hardware, but anyway it hung at this point and wouldn't accept any more keyboard input.
I tried booting from the W7 repair disk. It gets to the point of the "system recovery options" dialog where it asks me to select a keyboard input method, then again it won't accept input anymore. I don't get why it hangs on these input dialogs because it's using generic drivers at that point, right?
So my question is, am I screwed and have to start over with a clean install? Or is there some way to get it to the point of accepting a new key (which I've been told I can probably get from MS) and installing the right drivers? Would attempting the repair from W7 install media help, maybe?
I've never had this situation before. I know W7 is keyed to the hardware and you can't just slap the old drive in a new machine and go. But I expected there would be some path to re-entering a W7 key and getting new drivers installed.
When I booted it I got a BSOD STOP (went by too fast to see the number). Booted again and it went to startup repair. It scanned the system and then offered to do a restore to an earlier point. I know this would not work because it would restore to the old hardware, but anyway it hung at this point and wouldn't accept any more keyboard input.
I tried booting from the W7 repair disk. It gets to the point of the "system recovery options" dialog where it asks me to select a keyboard input method, then again it won't accept input anymore. I don't get why it hangs on these input dialogs because it's using generic drivers at that point, right?
So my question is, am I screwed and have to start over with a clean install? Or is there some way to get it to the point of accepting a new key (which I've been told I can probably get from MS) and installing the right drivers? Would attempting the repair from W7 install media help, maybe?