Put hard disk into another PC...
Community Forums/General Help/Put hard disk into another PC...
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| If I put my boot disk (Win7 64bit) into another PC with completely different specs, motherboard etc. what are the chances that it will boot up and reconfigure itself. Or should I just do a fresh install =) |
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| If I put my boot disk (Win7 64bit) into another PC with completely different specs, motherboard etc. what are the chances that it will boot up and reconfigure itself. Slim to zero. Or should I just do a fresh install =) I'm fairly sure you'll end up doing that anyway. |
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| If it has the exact same hard drive controller on the new motherboard, then it will boot. If not, then it will blue screen of death without the correct driver. |
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| Actually I managed something like this with a pretty good result recently (although the OS was Xubuntu and the hard disk was prepared using VMware). Wouldn't recommend it unless you're completely out of other options though. |
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| Does Win7 not allow you to do an 'in place upgrade' as you could with XP? |
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| If it has the exact same hard drive controller on the new motherboard, then it will boot. If not, then it will blue screen of death without the correct driver. There is a work around if it's not the same controller which involves installing the your OS onto another hard drive, making note of the registry key for the hard drive controller then altering the key in the hive of the OS on the hard drive that you want to use. A bit of googling should find you a way of how too do this. As long as there aren't to many changes you wont even have to re-activate either.Last edited 2010 |
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| what are the chances that it will boot up and reconfigure itself. Greatly depends, and depending on what your old and new config are, likely to be undesirable: Certain settings in windows are ONLY done at install time, and cannot be changed down the road. If your old PC is single core and the new one is dual/multi core, windows will have been installed using the single-core kernel, and will NOT make use of any of the additional cores when transplanted to new hardware. Even if the number of cores remains the same, it won't make use of any other new features of the processor that could greatly optimize the speed of windows: it'll be limping along on hardware that's capable of more. If you're switching architectures (AMD -> Intel, etc.) there's also a very large chance that windows will simply bluescreen when you try to boot it on the new hardware. At the same time, it may have attempted to reconfigure for -some- of the new hardware it spotted before the crash -- that, in turn, can lead to windows failing to launch on the original computer as well when you put the drive back in there. All in all: if you really don't care about having the old computer operational, you can give it a shot... but the end result is likely going to be undesirable: it most likely won't work, and even if it does you're going to end up with a significantly reduced user experience. I'd strongly recommend reinstalling from scratch. Even though it's generally a pain in the rear to do so, it still beats the alternative. :-? |
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| Probably asking for trouble, I'll do a fresh install I think ;) |
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| I managed it, in an emergency, by doing a repair installation. That was on XP. It worked pretty well, but maybe I was lucky? I wouldn't recommend it for a long term solution though either. |
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