swap drives windows not happy

[bennfine]

i didn't think the following would work and it doesn't...any advice would be welcomed.

i really like my dell latitude 6320 but the charger port broke (apparently a common problem). [tip-if this happens to you purchase a $5 docking station on ebay and you can charge and still use the machine). but it wont charge on its own. it will work on ac but not that well (the old plugged in but not charging routine).

I found an identical 6320 pretty cheap on ebay (same processor memory etcc) and thought hmmmm. can i just switch my hard drive and be good to go??

So I cloned my current hard drive into another drive, and put the the cloned drive into the other machine. Booted up and no go-the computer doesn't like what it is seeing. It goes into startup repair but after a while says it cannot repair the computer.

Any thoughts? is this just a really stupid idea or is there anyway to make it work?

thanks

 

[gbb0330]

swapping hard drives between identical models works.

2 possibilities:

you didn't clone it right

or

the computer that you bought from ebay has issues.

is the cloned drive working in the old laptop? the one with the broken charger port.

 

[bennfine]

Thanks for answering!

You made me ponder and I think I may have the solution...need to check tonight.

The clone does work in the source computer so its not that.

But I realized, I updated the bios in the old computer to A18 and the ebay computer is running A08. It could very well be that???? what do you think?

thanks

swapping hard drives between identical models works.

2 possibilities:

you didn't clone it right

or

the computer that you bought from ebay has issues.

is the cloned drive working in the old laptop? the one with the broken charger port.

 

[gbb0330]

only one way to find out: update the bios

 

[bennfine]

and that didn't work. dang.
same model, same memory, same chip........does windows repair for a bit with the cloned drive and then says can't repair.

thanks for the help-may just the computer as is without the cloned drive then.

swapping hard drives between identical models works.

2 possibilities:

you didn't clone it right

or

the computer that you bought from ebay has issues.

is the cloned drive working in the old laptop? the one with the broken charger port.

only one way to find out: update the bios

 

[BadAsAl]

Give this a try: Go through each setting in the BIOS of each computer and see if they match or not. Any differences on the old computer should be changed on the new computer. I would note the changes made in case you need to revert though.

 

[hang-the-9]

Go to the F8 boot menu, try "last known good" option from there. Also on the original system, check for any updated drivers before moving drives over.

Another thing to try, on the cloned drive so as not to mess with your original setup, in the working system, run sysprep with the /generalize switch.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee676646(v=ws.10).aspx

 

[gbb0330]

make sure both computers have the same settings in BIOS. especially settings related to the hard drive. RAID, SATA, AHCI