I have Windows 7 on a hard drive with a corrupted boot sequence. I made a clean Windows 7 installation on a new hard drive. Is there any way I can transfer programs from the old installation to the new one? Both are on the same computer.
Hi RFHarris, welcome to Sevenforums
If you have a system image of the machine back when it was working, then it's possible to reimage your drive so that the new programs will still be installed. Effectively a image is a "snapshot" of the PC as it was then.
I'm going to stick my neck out here a little though, and assume that you don't have one, or you wouldn't have had to reinstall. In that case I'm afraid that the programs will have to be reinstalled, in order to correctly write the registry keys. Merely copying the "Program Files" folder over won't help I'm afraid.
Hope that helps,
I do have a backup image made by acronis about 2 months old it would be satisfactory, it is on a home network computer, but I have changed out my MB in the meantime so don't believe it will boot now after restoral
I honestly have no idea whether it will accept it or not with a new Mobo, I'd say be safe though and just reinstall the programs, in the long run it could be less effort.
In this case I changed out my MB and Windows 7 would not boot, I went back and reinstalled old MB and ran Sysprep which finished ok. When I booted up I got so far along and then got into a "Windows cannot Continue" type loop. Checking the internet there have been others with the same type of problem but any solutions suggested did not solve the problem, so now I have a system which will not boot with my old MB or my new one. I have stuff set up on my old system which I need so want to avoid a total reinstall if at all possible.
I have a 2 month old Acronis image on a home network that I can restore but will not boot with the new MB. Trying to get a Paragon Adaptive Restore CD to see if that will help. In the meantime looking for any other ideas.
Im assuming this is a retail copy of Windows 7?
The easiest way would be to restore the image, and then run a Startup Repair that should sort it. You may need to run the Startup Repair up to 3 times, depending on how bad it is.
I'm afraid your only option now may be Paragon Adaptive Restore, if the image won't start on the new mobo as is often the case.
I seem to remember that you reinstalled the mobo to attempt to SysPrep the HD so it would start on new mobo. One last resort may be to PM the SysPrep tutorial author and expert Kari to ask for his help in that thread as he may have a workaround for the error you are getting on that heroic attempt.
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