Can I remove laptop drive, install Windows on desktop and place it back in laptop?

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Yohan123

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Feb 17, 2014
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Hi!
I was wondering if anyone has ever tried this and if it is possible? It has all the right connections(sata..).
Thanks in advance.
 
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Well, then it might be worthwhile to jump through the hoops. The problem is that I can't remember where I came across the directions for doing what you want. It wasn't hard. Something about setting most, if not all, device drivers to "General Driver". However, that doesn't seem to make sense, that option does not show up in Device Manager.

It would probably work if you did the initial install of Windows (Windows 7?), then before doing any patching go to Device Manager and uninstall the driver for every device, except perhaps for the CPU, then move the HDD to the laptop and let it boot up. If it does successfully boot up into Windows then you should be able to change the output to the external VGA (or whatever your external video...
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If you're talking about trying to install Windows on the laptop drive connected as an extra disk on a PC which already had Windows, then no, it won't work.

If you're talking about putting the laptop hard disk drive (HDD) into the desktop as the only HDD, then no, it won't work either. When Windows installs, it will detect the hardware in the desktop, all the chipsets and any other hardware on the motherboard or on adapter cards, and install drivers for them and configure itself for that hardware. Then, when you remove that laptop HDD and put it into the laptop, Windows will boot configured for the wrong hardware and have the wrong drivers.

While it is possible to jump through a lot of hoops and remove the device drivers before moving the HDD to the laptop, and then have Windows discover the new devices/hardware on the laptop, why bother? You've gone through almost twice as much work and time as just installing it on the laptop to begin with. And you'd have to do this before Windows was activated on the desktop, otherwise it would fail activation on the laptop (it would think that license key was being used on two different computers).
 
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I would have installed it directly on the laptop, but the screen is broken. And also the external monitor does not show the booting screen( i have tried all kind of stuff to make BIOS visible on the screen, but none worked).
 
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Well, then it might be worthwhile to jump through the hoops. The problem is that I can't remember where I came across the directions for doing what you want. It wasn't hard. Something about setting most, if not all, device drivers to "General Driver". However, that doesn't seem to make sense, that option does not show up in Device Manager.

It would probably work if you did the initial install of Windows (Windows 7?), then before doing any patching go to Device Manager and uninstall the driver for every device, except perhaps for the CPU, then move the HDD to the laptop and let it boot up. If it does successfully boot up into Windows then you should be able to change the output to the external VGA (or whatever your external video port is).
 
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Solution
You can't "clone" a set of virtual machine files onto a hard drive and have a PC boot from those files. Only virtual machine software, such as VMWare or Hyper-V, can boot or run from such files.

A VMware installation will reside mostly in a file, like a ".vhd" file that Microsoft uses. It's not clear to me how you would convert that onto a raw hard drive. You can't put a VHD file or any other virtual machine file onto a hard drive and have a PC's BIOS boot it up. PCs don't work that way. A virtual machine is a proprietary rendering of a hard disk into a proprietary file, usually along with another, separate file containing configuration information. PCs don't boot proprietary VM files, the only things that will boot those are proprietary virtual machine software, such as VMWare, Virtual PC, HyperV, etc.
 
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What I did was:
1. Installed Windows(8) on my desktop(without internet connection)
2. After the installation was complete I went to Device Manager and uninstalled graphics card drivers
3. Took the hdd out and placed it back in the laptop
Windows 8 recognized the video card driver and now everything is working like it should.
Thanks for your help guys :)
 
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