Help! How to transfer Windows 7 from one hard drive to another.

jacoberger

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Nov 26, 2015
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I just got my dads old computer that has a hard drive running windows 7. Windows was already installed when we bought the computer, there was no disc. Now the hard drive is broken but can still function but I want to transfer it out. The good thing is I have a hard drive running windows vista from a very old computer and I was wondering if i can replace the windows vista hard drive with Windows 7 and put that in my new computer?

Ps: I tried running the Windows vista hard drive on my new computer but it doesn't boot and goes straight to Windows recovery.

If anyone can help me transfer windows 7 it would be greatly appreciated.
 
Solution
you can burn a copy of Clonezilla onto a cd or make a usb stick bootable with clonezilla,once done. you can boot up clonezilla and clone your windows 7 drive to to vista drive.


also i would backup up any data on both drive as the vista drive will be overwritten obviously, but the win7 drive may completly fail during clone process.

caloeire

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Jan 20, 2016
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you can burn a copy of Clonezilla onto a cd or make a usb stick bootable with clonezilla,once done. you can boot up clonezilla and clone your windows 7 drive to to vista drive.


also i would backup up any data on both drive as the vista drive will be overwritten obviously, but the win7 drive may completly fail during clone process.
 
Solution

jacoberger

Reputable
Nov 26, 2015
5
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4,510


Thanks I appreciate your reasons and will follow your instructions I was just wondering if you can go into more detail so I don't misread or mess anything up.

 
You can't move a copy of Windows that was pre-installed on an OEM system to another computer, you need a new license. Cloning the drive won't work very well in most cases as the chipsets on the motherboard are different and you will either not be able to boot Widows at all or it will start but crash soon as it tries to load drivers.