Installing win 7 from a hard drive to a new hard

ROBSRODS4U · 07 May 2010

MY girlfriend broke the lcd screen and key board on a Compaq laptop that I bought her it had win 7 home premium. So I put her hard drive in my hp laptop that I am running vista on, I took out my hard drive installed hers and booted it up. It booted fine but I had to call microsoft and reregester it The problem I run into was when I tried to update the drivers and software they would not install I had no sound no usb ports and no dvd/cd drive I tried downloading the drivers from the original venders and they wouldn't install and hp said that my dv9627cl is not supported for win 7 upgrade and they dont intend on suporting it in the future. My question if I move all the files to an external harde drive how can I install them on a new hard drive on my desk top that is supported by hp for win 7. My desk top has 3 500 gb sata drives. I want to install win7 on one of the satas on my desk top and have a dual os vista and win7 I moved all the files off of the laptop drive that has win 7 on it to a external drive that I share with both of my computers.

not so gray matter · 07 May 2010

Technically you could clone the hard drive and all of it's labels and parameters. However, you'd do much better if you simply backed up all relevant data and used the CD Key to install it on your desktop. Hopefully Microsoft will let you (Given that you likely have an OEM CD Key)

If you really want to clone the partition, you need a program like Partition Wizard.
Partition Wizard is a Magic Server Partition Manager Software for Windows Server 2000/2003/2008 and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7.

This should allow you to clone all partitions on the hard drive to another drive. Keep in mind that you'll need all of the labels to stay intact as well (System, Boot, Active, etc)

gregrocker · 07 May 2010

Win7 should have swapped out all of the drivers when you installed it on the other machine.

Since it apparently didn't, or you changed them out for some reason or had missing drivers, run a Repair Install so that the installer can install the correct drivers as it does.

Choose the option to "Connect to internet during install" so that newer drivers are slipped into the installer while it does the Repair Install.

Immediately after install, connect to Windows Update and get any other newer drivers under Optional updates. You'll also need to reactivate at Computer>Properties link.

Only then should you supply any drivers which are missing in Device manager. This is not XP or even Vista - the Win7 installer is nearly driver complete with a small fortune spent to get the latest drivers into the installer or quickly delivered via Windows Update.