Question Help with transferring/ cloning drives

[zolah]

Hello everyone, I have recently upgraded my pc. A friend of mine upgraded his and I bought his old one. So my former PC was pretty old, still got the job done, but barely. When I took over the new PC i also used some of my old parts from my old one. I swapped the PSU and I also hooked up my hard drive and ssd with my old OS. Now I figured I would be able to just boot up my old OS from the bios menu, however when I went to do that, there was no option to do so and I also wasn't able to either in disk management. Everything is setup properly and I can view all 3 drives from my the new drive the computer came with. I'm wondering if its possible to clone or merge my old drive with my new one. I'd like to save my information at the very least and not wipe that drive without doing so.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Moving a bootable drive to new hardware requires that Windows be reinstalled. This is not optional in most cases.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Merging your old drives OS with your new drives OS is a no go. You can't do that and I'm not sure why you'd want to in the first place.

As far as retrieving the information you want from the old drive, what information, exactly, is it that you are wanting to get from it? I mean, you should be able to simply boot the old drive and retrieve it and if it is not allowing you the option of booting to that drive then there is a very good chance that if you had more than one drive attached to the old system that the boot partition may have inadvertently been located on a secondary drive, and without that drive being ALSO attached to the motherboard along with the drive containing the OS, there would be no option or ability to boot to that drive.

Seeing a screenshot of the disk management screen showing the listed partitions on that specific drive would be helpful in determining if in fact this is the case.

Also, if you haven't already you might be wise to try disconnecting the drive that the new OS installation is on, and then connecting the old OS drive to see if the drive is then listed as a bootable device.

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