Windows 7: New Computer, Old Hard Drive

I have recently built a brand new custom computer.
It consists of an:
Mobo -ASRock z77 extreme4
GPU - HIS Radeon HD 7970
CPU - Intel Core i5 2500k
PSU - NZXT Hale90 750w
Case - NZXT Phantom 820
Heatsink - Cooler Master Hyper 212
RAM - Kingston Hyperx 16gb 2 DIMM's

The problem I am having is when I try booting up into Windows 7 from my old HDD.
I am getting an error that will not boot into Windows as new hardware has been connected.
I have tried running the drivers directly from the disc and once I have installed those I then tried starting the computer again. Again I received the message about it may not be starting due to new hardware.

I have done a little research and all I have come up with is re-install Windows 7 I would rather not do that, if I was to decide to do that I would spent £100 and buy an SSD as a boot drive.



Any advice is accepted, thanks.

Martin.

See this tutorial. The old Windows 7 installation expects to see your old hardware.

Repair Install

Thanks, I will have a further look when I am home. At a microsoft certified security fundamentals course just now.

There is an alternative -- if you want to consider it (I did this and KNOW it works) ...

Macrium Reflect offers a Pro version of their app which has an option to allow you to "migrate" an existing Windows 7 install to another PC. What happens is, you burn a boot CD from their product, boot from that in your PC with the old HDD connected, and choose the option to install to different hardware.

It will then prompt for the drivers for the new PC. At that point, you stick in the driver CD that came with the new CD, and the MR tool will search for the new drivers needed for the new PC and replace the old drivers with the new drivers.

When done, you remove the CD, reboot the PC -- and you're ready to go.

This is a good choice when you can't get to a desktop due to driver incompatibility.

If you can get to a desktop, instead of going to all that trouble, I would just insert the driver CD and have it install ALL the drivers automatically (there is usually an option to do that). That will give you a set of drivers that are KNOWN to work with the new PC. After that, you should go the manufacturer's site to look for driver updates.

Ok, thank you. I will look into this method a little more. Thanks a lot for your reply.