Putting a laptop hard drive into a desktop

[ascarygrunt]

The other day I was in my friend's garage and noticed a decently new HP desktop sitting there. I asked him what was wrong and he said it was "broken". I took it and within 30 minutes, had it running again, Just had to unplug two ram sticks.

The desktop is an HP Media Center PC Product Number: GN551AA#ABA. It has Windows Vista x86 installed on it. I hate Vista and plugged in a hard drive from a broken laptop I have that has Windows 7 on it. It will get to the "Starting Windows" screen, and restart and recommend a startup repair, which doesn't work. I figured it has to be the fact that the Windows 7 hard drive has all the drivers for the Compaq laptop, not the HP desktop. Is there a way to copy the drivers that I need from the Vista hard drive onto the Windows 7 one so it will boot?

Or is there another issue that will prevent me from running Windows 7 on that desktop. The Windows 7 installed on the hard drive is OEM from Compaq, so perhaps that will be a problem?

 

[BadAsAl]

Most common reason is an incorrect SATA operation setting in the BIOS. This has to match what was set when Windows was originally installed. The settings are IDE, AHCI or RAID. Most likely you need IDE or AHCI for the laptop hard drive to boot. Just change it and try booting. Hopefully your BIOS allows you to change this, else you may just end up having to reinstall Windows 7.

 

[quilciri]

It will not work with an OEM-locked version of windows. You will need to reinstall with a non-OEM OS.

You can use windows easy transfer to move his profile, settings and files, but you will need to reinstall any programs you want to use on the system.

 

[BadAsAl]

After I thought about it a bit, I was going to mention that too. Also if Windows 7 was preinstalled by the OEM, then you can't use the Windows 7 drive or license key legally in any other computer anyway.