how do you intergrate an old harddrive from a crashed computer onto a new system?

[sapppppp]

So i recently shorted my old laptop out by way of general self stupidity... i tried to use a too high output voltage dc adapter with a usb hub but thats besides the point. What im trying to do now is im trying to use the OS installed on my laptops harddrive to boot another computer i was able to get it to boot correctly but i figured there was going to be hardware/software issues due to the new environment but after looking around on the web for a while i cant seem to find any tutorials on what steps you would need to take to successfully intergrate the old OS with the new hardware environment.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

You are not allowed to transfer the pre-installed OEM OS from a laptop to another computer - - it's in breach of Microsoft's EULA.

If I've misunderstood your post, please enlighten me.

 

[dshort01]

You can beat your head all you want trying to take a short cut here. If it doesn't boot, it doesn't boot. You are better doing a raw install of on a new OS and then try to recover the data off your old HDD which I assume you want to do. Otherwise none of this makes sense unless you ran out of money.

 

[sapppppp]

Well i do have the windows 7 install disc i just figured the whole thing would be 100x faster if i could just throw my old harddrive into my new rig and just pick up where i left off instead of having to go through the bs of having to transfer everything off the exact same OS im going to be putting everything on just to reformat and have to re-transfer everything back onto the original harddrive since my old drive is a 1tb drive and the other drives i have range from a 250gb ata to a 160gb sata and 3 80gb sata's

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Windows 7 -- then you'll have to do fresh install no matter how tiresome you think it is. It won't tolerate being moved to entirely different hardware, even Windows 10 won't tolerate it in some cases. You'll encounter all sorts of issues (some not straight away) if you move Windows 7 to a different motherboard.

 

[sapppppp]

Idk maybe i was just being a bit of a techochondriac because after windows went through a few update,configure and reboots everything seems to have reset to how it was on my laptop even the desktop icons

Guess its eorth mentioning i was moving it from an AMD system to an AMD system, really the only differences is that my laptop was an asus and this desktop rig is running some MIT tweaker mb and a slightly weaker core its basically a duplicate system just a desktop instead of a laptop

 

[USAFRet]

Idk maybe i was just being a bit of a techochondriac because after windows went through a few update,configure and reboots everything seems to have reset to how it was on my laptop even the desktop icons

1. You'll be chasing little issues for weeks.

2. That will very shortly report back as Unactivated. You might even get 30 days out of it.

 

[sapppppp]

Well if all im going to have to worry about is a genuine windows problem iv come to terms with that a long time ago and i just delete slui from the system32. Long as theres nothing critical that could make my drive unsuable that anyone knows about?

 

[sapppppp]

From what im seeing just from what i have tried in the last few hours is that if the hardware enviroment is similar it will accept the drive with very few issues. I would go figure going from an AMD to an intel system probably wouldnt have worked this smoothly but since the hardware is relitively the same other then the sound card but still if anyone has any bad experiences doing this like a fatal crash it would be great to know of before everything goes downhill, if not then i guess theres nothing serious to worry about other then making the transition through software updating

 

[sapppppp]

If anyone cares to know the process i took to make my old OS boot on a new rig

1. I inserted the windows 7 disc i used to inatall windows on my old drive into my new rig i plugged my harddrive in

2. I used the startup repair utility to recover my OS

3. I rebooted my pc and chose the recovered OS to boot from

4. After logging in i used CCleaner to clear about 600 registry entrys and i rebooted my computer and waited for windows to configure itself

5. I uninstalled a bunch of the old software like my sound card drivers, adobe software, my graphics card software updates and anything else that relied on hardware to run

6. I re-installed the necessary software that i just removed so it can reconfigure itself correctly

7. I ran the system disc cleanup utility to catch any remaining now useless files

And far as i can see everything is running just fine

Be aware this transfer is from an AMD system to an AMD system with similar specs. Im not sure how well this will work with systems that aren't similar but im guessing you will probably run into alot more issues

Also dont take this as professional advice im just sharing what has worked for me via trial and error

 

[USAFRet]

So not quite just "plug n play".


I've seen almost identical laptops fail.
I've seen disparate desktops work.