Just to let you know, issue has been solved. Thank you to GregRocker and all the others who have been so patient with me during this adventure.
I wound up speaking to Dell and they compared my old dead Studio (whose hard drive I wanted to use), the Precision (which would not run my old hard drive), the Optiplex at work (which does run my old hard drive).
They said that there are some drivers that install in Precision when they install Win 7 that cannot be added afterwards. I could use my old hard drive, but only with an OS reload, which defeats my whole purpose. The Optiplex boots my old hard drive because the system is close enough to my old Studio to work.
They then said a new XPS would work for me and if my old hard drive does not work on it, I return it. They documented that as well. Yeah, it is a new box but compared to the costs in software and configuration, the documented promise by Dell seemed the simplest and most efficient use of my resources, mental and financial. I have the optical drives, sound card, and data drive from my old PC and the willingness to add them on.
But the adventure was not over. Out of the box, the new PC worked beautifully on the 2GB Win 8.1 that came with. They even included an adapter from HDMI to mini-HDMI to enable to use my old monitor with the new video card.
I then tried to boot with my old studio hard drive. For the most part, it worked. One major problem, my old hard drive would not see the Realtek network card integrated to the motherboard. But strangely enough, my old hard drive could see the sound and video components on the new motherboard. But not the NIC.
Using another PC, I looked up drivers for the new XPS. Two chipset drivers but nothing Realtek except for a driver for the integrated audio card.
I called Dell and explained the problem. They said that Windows 8 is "injected" into the motherboard of my PC and that is why my old hard drive will not see the network card. He said he could send me a link to the Realtek network drivers for the PC but that they would NOT install, because the motherboard will see my Windows 7 and stop the install.
Sounds good but ominous. I hung up and as soon as I did, I figured a workaround, to buy a discrete NIC and install it. As long as the NIC had drivers for Win7, I was OK. And to bed I went.
Next morning I had the link to the Realtek drivers in my e-mail. I figure they won't work, but getting a NIC would definitely do the trick. But a funny thing happened, the Realtek drivers installed and I immediately connected to my router. This is a desktop PC and it runs on an Ethernet cable. I was back in business. Of course, I had cleanup work to do, 91 Windows/Office patches, 500MB of Symantec patches, a lot of other stuff. But I was working.
I was able to revalidate Office 2010 instantly, same with Acronis and Norton 360. I lost Roxio 2011 but that was an easy workaround. I added a second hard drive and a 2nd optical drive and then cloned the hard drive into another one and switched to it. Amazing!!!!
Next jobs, i want to migrate my System Drive to a 512 SSD. I have the right software (Acronis), I have to work on the physical install, the cage on this system is quirky.
I do not see a risk-reward benefit to convert from MBR to GPT. If anyone wants to convince me, I will listen.
I thank everyone, especially Greg Rocker and D Sperber.
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