Can Windows 7 be installed on 2 hard drives?

Hi there.

I installed Windows 7 Home Premium on my laptop a few days ago. Unfortunately I can detect my hard drive beginning to fail in the last day or so.

I have the single licence single PC edition.

Windows 7 has been activated on my system, can I replace the hard drive and reinstall Windows 7 to a new hard drive on my PC?

I am guessing it is ok as I suspect my PC serial no. is stored in a Microsoft database somewhere when activated and therefore not dependant on the hard drive.

I am just looking for confirmation of this.

many thanks in advance

rogerk05 said:

I have the single licence single PC edition.

Where did you get it?

I suspect that if you had any problems activating then you could call up Microsoft and explain the situation (activate over the telephone).

Make a backup image before you replace the hard drive and then restore it after replacing the hard drive. Don't have to worry about activation that way.

Use Windows 7 Backup Imaging to save the HDD image to an external drive. Then reimage your new drive after install. Keep the image so reinstalls are a thing of the past.

A Retail version of Win7 can migrate to any computer you wish, as long as it is on only one. It belongs to you.

An Upgrade version is tied to the qualifying OS it upgraded, but only in the EULA since they also only track that it is on one machine at a time, so in effect it can migrate.

Only the OEM version is tied to the hardware config on the machine, but changing out one hardware item is not enough to invalidate the license.

Thanks to everyone for their replies.

The Windows 7 Home Premium edition I bought was a full retail version from Amazon.

Unfortunately imaging the existing drive is not really possible as the best usage I can get out of the drive is about 15 mins before an I/O error, i.e. drive fails to read info and a strange whirring noise starts. So imaging isn't really an option.

So the plan is to reinstall to a new drive.

regards

rogerk05 said:

Can Windows 7 be installed on 2 hard drive ?

Yes .. As many HDDs as you want ... with the original Product code
As long as the HDD is used in the original computer.