Can I move my system drive to another computer and have it work?

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I've replaced motherboards in Windows computers with a completely different make/model/type of motherboard than the old one. I've yet to have the system fail to boot to Windows with the new motherboard.

That said, it often takes numerous reboots as Windows goes through numerous "detecting new hardware" phases, and installing new drivers which require a reboot.

With that in mind, I always copy the contents of the Windows install disk into a subdirectory on the hard drive, prior to changing out the system. Otherwise, you may end up in a Catch-22 scenario where it needs to load the CD device driver from the CD. (BTDT)

As you said Leo if the new machine is dramatically different then it will not work , for me actually i prefer to run every machine with it's custom system , this way is more successful and fast.

Thanks Leo..
http://www.fosdir.com

Hello, I'd like to ask a question relating, kind of, to using other hard drives.
I have a removeable hard drive which I'd like to make secure. At the moment I just plug it in and use it to sore data, photographs. Could I make it secure by copying windows vista from my laptop to the hard drive, errrrrrr???????

Hoping to get a response, Gail

1 - Vista cannot be copied to another hd, especially an external one, and work. Actually i seriously doubt you could even install it there.
2 - Wherever you would put it, the security is the same.

I had to remove a guys hard drive from his old computer and put it in another machine after his power supply burned out. It would not boot up but a simple repair install and I was able to save the files he wanted saved on the hard drive. And got is second machine up and running.

http://www.geocities.com/terryhollett2003/

How 'bout this: I have my system on a partitioned drive (partition=30 gigs) which I use [almost] exclusively for the system (Windows, System/32, 'Documents and settings' and 'Program Files' etc.) I don't want to move to another machine; I want to move my 'C' drive to another hard drive/bigger partition and I want to keep ‘everything’ as it is- meaning the Windows configuration and the installed software. Of course I also want to accomplish this in 2 1/2 minutes. What do you think would be the best way to go about achieving that goal? BTW- My OS is XP Pro.

Hi Leo
This article has really confused me. Are you saying that the image I made of my Windows XP operating system with Acronis True Image, would not be able to be installed on a new computer or even a new hard disk?

Although I have not experienced Vista on the copy yet, I can vouch for Windows XP. Basically when you install Windows the first time, it chooses a HAL type (hardware abstraction layer). If you have a single processor with only one core, it chooses the 1 HAL. If you have a dual core or more than one processor it will choose the 2^n HAL. The big difference is the 1 HAL can only ever interact with one processor machines. So if you take a machine that had been running the 1 HAL and put it in a dual core machine, you will blue screen every time, even booting to safe-mode, etc. This can be resolved by booting the windows disk and repairing your Windows installation (windows disk will choose the 2^n HAL and you should come up ok.)

For the 2^n HAL's, they can go backwards, since anyone with any math skills know that 2^0 = 1. It will issue out the instructions in a correct manner to the processor, although you do lose a bit of computing power from it having to make that computation on every instruction, only to issue it to a single processor (not a noticeable slowdown).

Once you are up and running with a working HAL and windows build, its just a matter of updating all your device drivers. Hopefully you have hardware from a big company, as they tend to have very friendly UI's for getting to various hardware drivers.

Have fun!

Hi, This guy has a solution,

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/07/09/move-windows-xp-hard-drive-or-change-motherboard-without-getting-blue-screen-of-death/

Just this week I tried moving a hard drive direct from a box with a 64-bit Asus board with a VIA chipset and 64-bit AMD Athlon 64 2.2GHz single-core CPU and 2GB DDR2 RAM to a box with 64-bit Asrock board with an nVidia chipset and 32-bit AMD Sempron 1.8GHz single-core CPU and 1GB DDR RAM. (Both of which I built myself.)

On powerup everything booted but it was so slow (1/2 hour to fully boot.) and clearly didn't like its new situation. I spent quite a few hours trying to optimise it, installing the stsyem board's nVidia drivers etc, but with little success. (Maybe it had something to do with the big difference in CPU architecture>) I ended up formatting the drive and installing Windows XP again. (+ all the drivers from the motherboard CD, then updating them.) It worked like a dream from then on.

This is the first time that I've actually tried swapping a loaded disk as primary disk between 2 boxes. I'd recommend, from my limited experience of this operation, taking Leo's stance and reinstalling Windows in such a case. Had I done so in the first place it would have saved me hours of hassle. (Unless you're moving the drive to an identically-built box perhaps?) I've heard elsewhere that a maintenance reinstall might do the trick; but I've yet to try that in this situation.

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