That's called the hardware profiling and why it's not advised to bother going to MS to see any previous installation moved reactivated to start with. To simply see if 7 will run on an old case a fast temp install allows the 120 day extended trial. https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...-120-days.html
There is absolutely no reason to uninstall or make any changes to the system before you move the drive to the "new" computer. The only thing that would gain is a minimal amount of disk space taken up by the existing drivers. Windows simply won't load them once that hardware is no longer available. No need to make the process more complicated than it is.
You could reinstall the drive back to its original system and then run sysprep tool to clean up the image http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-5838633.html
Once the image is clean you can transfer it to another system with different hardware.
I usually run sysprep with the generalize option for migrations.
Without sysprep you have to manually remove the bad stuff.
The idea works but Sysprep is mainly for XP not Vista or 7. The best option is planning a clean install from the start and use of the Windows Easy Transfer tool to back up and then restore all user files and settings once all the programs are on fresh.
You also see a new hardware profile created at the same time. You start off with a totally fresh system registry as well without a load of temp folders and other leftovers to contend with.
That may be the ideal method if your system is running. When you have a stale drive away from its host then reinstalling back and running sysprep should work.
I have only run sysprep on Win7 so it works quite well. I used this method last with Windows Deployment Services during the capture process which will only run on a Win7 that has run sysprep with the generalize switch command.
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On any new set of hardwares the best results are shown to be from a clean install of the OS especially when the hardwares are not identical. That insures the best detection of all hardwares during the installation process.
A program like Sysprep is mainly for fast use of any image transferred noting that even with that the advice is a minimal install on the first machine before the transfer takes place. You may as well perform a clean install on the new machine if you are going to do that on the old anyways.
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