Getting New Win 7 Pro PC To Work With Old Home Premium Drive

gregrocker said:

Enter BIOS setup to look for settings for CSM, Legacy BIOS, UEFI or anything similar. If there are dual choices then choose only Legacy. If in doubt post back camera snaps of these or any other possibly related settings choices. If you're seeing UEFI choices when booting the disk then it may still have too much UEFI.

What about these results which I've been waiting for now for several days?

You're placing a ticket with Paragon for what? A five year old PAR boot disk wouldn't be supported any longer. They'll want you to try their latest paid PAR version whatever that is, but the only improvement likely would be UEFI and Windows 8 support when the image you feel you must have transferred is neither.

Do you know for sure that the Win7 Professional which came with that PC is installed to UEFI. Look in Disk Mgmt to see if it has a EFI System partition or the 100mb System Reserved partition. Post a screenshot of Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

I did a study of the OptiPlex and a study of my PC. The OptiPlex says RAID enabled, my PC says AHCI. I will change my PCs settings and see if that works

OK, I found a BIOS setting for SATA operation. Choices are disabled (hard drive not seen), AT, AHCI (default) and RAID. On the last three settings, a reboot just gives me a BSOD with a STOP: 0x0000007B error. Of course, I am using legacy.

Just to let you know, issue has been solved. Thank you to GregRocker and all the others who have been so patient with me during this adventure.

I wound up speaking to Dell and they compared my old dead Studio (whose hard drive I wanted to use), the Precision (which would not run my old hard drive), the Optiplex at work (which does run my old hard drive).

They said that there are some drivers that install in Precision when they install Win 7 that cannot be added afterwards. I could use my old hard drive, but only with an OS reload, which defeats my whole purpose. The Optiplex boots my old hard drive because the system is close enough to my old Studio to work.

They then said a new XPS would work for me and if my old hard drive does not work on it, I return it. They documented that as well. Yeah, it is a new box but compared to the costs in software and configuration, the documented promise by Dell seemed the simplest and most efficient use of my resources, mental and financial. I have the optical drives, sound card, and data drive from my old PC and the willingness to add them on.

But the adventure was not over. Out of the box, the new PC worked beautifully on the 2GB Win 8.1 that came with. They even included an adapter from HDMI to mini-HDMI to enable to use my old monitor with the new video card.

I then tried to boot with my old studio hard drive. For the most part, it worked. One major problem, my old hard drive would not see the Realtek network card integrated to the motherboard. But strangely enough, my old hard drive could see the sound and video components on the new motherboard. But not the NIC.

Using another PC, I looked up drivers for the new XPS. Two chipset drivers but nothing Realtek except for a driver for the integrated audio card.

I called Dell and explained the problem. They said that Windows 8 is "injected" into the motherboard of my PC and that is why my old hard drive will not see the network card. He said he could send me a link to the Realtek network drivers for the PC but that they would NOT install, because the motherboard will see my Windows 7 and stop the install.

Sounds good but ominous. I hung up and as soon as I did, I figured a workaround, to buy a discrete NIC and install it. As long as the NIC had drivers for Win7, I was OK. And to bed I went.

Next morning I had the link to the Realtek drivers in my e-mail. I figure they won't work, but getting a NIC would definitely do the trick. But a funny thing happened, the Realtek drivers installed and I immediately connected to my router. This is a desktop PC and it runs on an Ethernet cable. I was back in business. Of course, I had cleanup work to do, 91 Windows/Office patches, 500MB of Symantec patches, a lot of other stuff. But I was working.

I was able to revalidate Office 2010 instantly, same with Acronis and Norton 360. I lost Roxio 2011 but that was an easy workaround. I added a second hard drive and a 2nd optical drive and then cloned the hard drive into another one and switched to it. Amazing!!!!

Next jobs, i want to migrate my System Drive to a 512 SSD. I have the right software (Acronis), I have to work on the physical install, the cage on this system is quirky.

I do not see a risk-reward benefit to convert from MBR to GPT. If anyone wants to convince me, I will listen.

I thank everyone, especially Greg Rocker and D Sperber.

The only reason to reinstall to GPT is to test the UEFI BIOS vs. Legacy BIOS improvements which are different on each model and may include mouse support, graphical interface, faster boot, and added pre-boot security. Macrium Imaging works well with UEFI.

I would try running without Norton for a week using one of the free lightweight AV's recommended Clean Reinstall Windows 7 to compare the difference. Norton is overweening bloatware that always impacts performance.

The only injection of Windows 8 into the mobo that I can think of is that the BIOS chip is hard coded with the activation for Windows 8, nothing else. The OS is always on a separate drive.

Good advice. MBR to GPT then does not make sense. I have enough to do .

That said, IE 11 crashed on me this morning. Simply would hang before it showed any home page. And...it worked yesterday with no problem. I am fully patched and tried all sorts of solutions to no avail. Both Chrome and Opera worked, so it had to be the browser. Norton 360, for all its issues, got it working. As you said, it does drain resources but a full scan, registry cleanup and removal of temp files got me running when nothing else could.

I still have the Precision, which will become my wife's next PC. Her laptop/desktop replacement is still working well.

Now on my XPS 8700, do you see any compelling reason for me to upgrade to Professional from Home Premium. No new features are needed, it is a home PC, not on a business network. Is Pro more stable than Home Premium? I am running x64 on Home Premium.

Again, thanks for all the help!!!!

There is no reason to upgrade to Pro unless you need specific extra expensive features in the higher version. Otherwise it is the exact same OS with only a few extra features unlocked.

A Norton registry cleaner would probably ruin Win7. The only registry cleaner I'd use is CCleaner. You forfeit Win7 native perfect performance with Norton.