where is windows installed?

[clabbers]

All these years I have always assumed that Windows itself was installed on the hard drive. I got a surprise when my laptop stopped loading. A friend told me how take out the internal drives to see if they would work on a different computer because I need to recover some info from them. Both work fine hooked up to Windows 10 (laptop has Windows 7) but of course 10 isn't reading what I need and besides I would like to have both the laptop and desktop working.

When Windows is installed on a computer what is it installed on? Is there some sort of, in effect, a hard drive tied to the motherboard that can't be removed? Never thought about it until now and since I am going to try to get it working after the holidays I'd like to know.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Luminary]

Windows lives on the hard drive.

If you have an OEM version of Windows the Windows Key used in the installation is also matched to the motherboard model to ensure you don't use it on more than one PC, but the OS itself always lives directly on the hard drive.

**Sometimes the Windows installation will spread itself out over more than one drive, so if you have two HDD's in a PC and try a fresh Windows install it will install a part of the core files on both drives so both are needed for the OS to run correctly. This is why we always recommend to remove all but one drive from a system when installing a new version of Windows.

 

[clabbers]

Yeah, no OEM version copy. Does this mean that if I get the laptop working (not sure but I've seen it before on a different computer when the fan stopped working and it overheated) that I would have to do a clean install and lose what's on the two drives I took out? Alternately, if I could get hold of another win7 working computer I could upload the missing info onto an external drive?

 

[USAFRet]

Moving a drive with an installed OS to a different PC, and expecting it to actually boot up with its original OS....often fails.

You can generally access it as a secondary drive, but booting from that drive in a whole different PC is...sometimes yes, sometimes no.
The OS is on the drive, but it knows what motherboard and system it was installed with.

 

[clabbers]

Thank you. So if I get the laptop working and it's the same motherboard and system then I should be good. Hope reigns supreme! Thank you all for your help.

 

[USAFRet]

Thank you. So if I get the laptop working and it's the same motherboard and system then I should be good. Hope reigns supreme! Thank you all for your help.

Not necessarily.
I recently had two almost identical Compaq laptops. Swapping drives with fully functional Win 7 Home between the two would not work.
Move the drive back, it boots no problem.

Only thing you can do is try.
After that...reinstall the OS.

 

[clabbers]

Thank you. I have been very lucky because I used a program I downloaded called Recova and it has brought back all my information I was looking for on my drives. I'm going to back up the info and then see if I can fix the laptop so I can move everything back to it. It turns on but doesn't boot however it had seemed to be overheating before and it is very quiet when on now so I assume we've got a fan problem. Meantime, yea! Recova!