Win 8 BIOS changed to legacy, driver transfer?  

I have an HP Pavilion 500-169,

I have changed BIOS to legacy and spent hours finding Drivers for it, it only has an 80GB Temporary HDD right now but im upgrading to a 500GB. Is there a way to transfer the drivers from the old HDD to the new HDD without having to spend hours trying to find the drivers again?

403Phaze said:

I have an HP Pavilion 500-169,

Did it come with Win7 or Win8 pre-installed on it? Or what??

I have changed BIOS to legacy

Why?

What is your goal? What was wrong with the delivered machine as it arrived?

and spent hours finding Drivers for it

Why?

Are you trying to install Win7 on the machine which arrived with Win8? Other way around? What?

Why would you now need drivers if the original arrived machine was operational?

Are you trying to re-install Windows from scratch from a retail Windows installation DVD, and think you now need additional drivers for the HP machine? Why don't you get those drivers from the HP driver support site for your machine?

it only has an 80GB Temporary HDD right now but im upgrading to a 500GB. Is there a way to transfer the drivers from the old HDD to the new HDD without having to spend hours trying to find the drivers again?

Assuming the original delivered machine was already operational and usable except for the small size of its hard drive, why didn't you just "copy" the contents of the old hard drive to the new hard drive, using a "system image" product such as free Macrium Reflect? You'd need an intermediate storage device, such as an external USB 2.0/3.0 drive, but you should have one of these anyway for eventual regular system backups.

You install Macrium Reflect on the old 80GB system, run the program to take a "system image" out to the external USB drive. You also burn a standalone bootable CD for Macrium Reflect using its "wizard". Then you swap out the old 80GB drive, swap in the new 500GB drive, boot from the standalone bootable CDyou just burned, and run the restore of that "system image" you just created, from the external USB drive right onto the new 500GB drive.

Don't forget you may have to play with the "boot device sequence" in the BIOS of the machine, in order to boot to the standalone CD before checking hard drives. You might also want to check the boot sequence in the BIOS after installing the new 500GB drive, to be sure things are as they should be.

If you want, you can then use free Partition Wizard to adjust partition sizes on your new 500GB drive, possibly shrinking the C-partition where Windows lives and creating a second "data" partition, etc.