Dying Vista HDD to new Windows 7 HDD

My HP e7790Y had a Vista SATA hard drive that was alive but dying.

I installed a second SATA drive, went in through Vista to load Windows 7 onto the new hard drive, and transferred all of the files over to the Windows 7 drive.

When I started the computer it automatically went to Windows 7, which is where I wanted to be, so I was happy for a while until the original Vista drive started to die intermittently.

When the Vista drive quits working I get the screen to access the BIOS, after which it freezes on the black screen with the flashing cursor. The same thing occurs if I try removing the Vista drive and booting off of the Windows 7 drive. The Windows 7 drive and the DVD drive don't appear to be accessible unless the Vista drive is working.

I am always able to access the BIOS if needed.

I believe that I have a few minutes of life left in the Vista drive, so I could use that time to either access the Vista drive and/or the Windows 7 drive if there is something that I can do to fix the problem. I'd like to permanently remove the Vista drive and replace it with the Windows 7 drive.

Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks, Bob

nedinc said:

My HP e7790Y had a Vista SATA hard drive that was alive but dying.

I installed a second SATA drive, went in through Vista to load Windows 7 onto the new hard drive, and transferred all of the files over to the Windows 7 drive.

When I started the computer it automatically went to Windows 7, which is where I wanted to be, so I was happy for a while until the original Vista drive started to die intermittently.

When the Vista drive quits working I get the screen to access the BIOS, after which it freezes on the black screen with the flashing cursor. The same thing occurs if I try removing the Vista drive and booting off of the Windows 7 drive. The Windows 7 drive and the DVD drive don't appear to be accessible unless the Vista drive is working.

I am always able to access the BIOS if needed.

I believe that I have a few minutes of life left in the Vista drive, so I could use that time to either access the Vista drive and/or the Windows 7 drive if there is something that I can do to fix the problem. I'd like to permanently remove the Vista drive and replace it with the Windows 7 drive.

Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks, Bob

Hi Bob and welcome


There are several things you can do. First the reason for the Black screen is probably because there are files necessary to the boot process in the vista drive. If you are no longer looking to dual boot you can do a repair install from the win 7 dvd and that will install the correct boot files to the win 7 partition.

The other is to go into the vista drive (if you can) and copy the files in a hidden folder called boot to the root of the win 7 drive.

Let us know if you need help with either of these

Ken

That did it! Plugging the new hard drive into port 0 on the motherboard allowed me to boot from the Windows 7 DVD and repair the MBR. I could have used the repair option but decided instead to do a clean install of Win 7 64 bit, replacing the Win 7 32 bit that I had installed previously, and adding back the 2Gb of RAM that I was forced to pull when Win 7 32 bit wouldn't run on 4Gb of RAM.

The Win 7 installation disk has a nice little feature. It wipes the drive, but before doing so saves the old files in an "Old file" folder. It warns to backup files anyway, which I had already done, but it's nice that it tries to help salvage things.

Thank you, everyone!

Bob