Reactivation after hardware changes

Apologies if this is a naive question or in the wrong section but but I'm only a fairly competant user and have very limited technical knowledge, and although I've searched carefully I can't find an answer to this question anywhere.

I have Windows 7 Home Premium on my C drive with most of my program files. I also have a second drive (H drive) with all my data files. As the motherboard and video card are starting to fail, I'm having a new computer built with a new motherboard, memory, fan, graphics card and DVD drive. I'll be putting the current C Drive and the second (H) drive, along with the audio card, from the current computer into the new computer .

I've been told that even though I'll be installing the two drives, with everything (operating system, program files, data files) on them as it is now, I'll have to reinstall Windows 7 and all the programs onto them from scratch as the changes are so great I cannot simply reauthorise the computer. I installed from the full disk (i.e. not an OEM copy) version of Windows 7.

This seems a bit excessive as it means having only recently done this when I upgraded from XP to 7 I'm going to have to do the whole thing again. Is this the case or have I been misinformed please? Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Hopefully you will have the good luck with moving your Win7 to new hardware as I have experienced about a dozen times myself.

If it will start up, it will swap out all of the drivers, requesting several restarts. Then it should run with no problem. A Repair Install would sort out any performance issues or activation if necessary.

Some have said they didn't even have to change the activation, however I have always immediately swapped out the Product Key at Computer>Properties Activation link just to be sure it doesn't error. Only once would it not take the key, so I ran the Repair Install which resets activation.

Bare Foot Kid, richc46, and gregrocker: Many thanks to all of you for posting this information and for the promptness of the replies. It's really good news to know I won't have to reinstall everything and I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help in this.

I hope you didn't get your hopes up too high. Starting Win7 on new hardware is supposed to be an "iffy" proposition, so you can't really expect it to start but just hope for the best.

I have gotten lucky with this but some others haven't had such luck.

There is a program called Paragon Adaptive Restore which is a paid program that will adapt it for you if it will not start on its own on the new hardware.

There is also the possibility of starting it in Safe Mode to install the chipset and video drivers (minimum) to help it start up if it won't start up normally.

Let us know if you need any further help.

You will have to reactivate it , but that SHOULD be about it, save for drivers.
But windows will take care of that.

Hi all,

Once again many thanks for all the help and advice. As I'm a bit naive with the technical side of computers I had the new PC built by a professional and he came round to change the drives, and the sound card.

Unforunately I seem to have been one of the unlucky ones and no matter what we did the system would not recognise the old C Drive as a boot disk. An attempt at repair had the system seeing the operating system but steadfastly refusing to boot from it or repair it in any way. After some hours of trying everything we (or to be honest he) could think of trying we threw in the towel. I used Laplink PC Mover to copy the files and other programs which took seven hours. Then we reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch and copied the files back with PC Mover. It's worked pretty well although for some reason it din't copy the cookies and I'm having to sign into everything again.
There were a couple of programs I needed to uninstall and reinstall but things could have been far worse. There is only one program I can't get to work at all and I'm on to the company about that. I do at least have a much faster and more powerful system now. Windows installed in minutes and after the seven hours it took to copy the files to Laplink, it took less than three to restore them.

Slowly but surely everything is getting back to normal though the speed of this machine - after the last one - is almost scary. This morning I had 26 Microsoft updates and 7 others. I set them off and went to make a cup of coffee, only to come back and find it had installed the lot of them. I think it might be fun playing with this new, for me, mega-machine.

One again, I really appreciated your courtesy and taking the time to post replies to my enquiry.