Move Existing Hard Drive to New PC

[FPDrummer34]

So my original PC was an HP Compaq dx2250 with an AMD Athlon chipset running Win7 Ultimate x64. Unfortunately, a few days ago, the motherboard fried. Because I have a large amount of important programs on the PC's hard drive, I was wondering about the possibility of moving the existing hard drive into a new PC. I was able to locate a seemingly identical build, a Dell Dimension E521 with an Athlon X2 chipset running Win7 Ultimate x64. When I hooked up the hard drive from my old PC, the boot process gets to the point of "Starting Windows" with the Windows logo starting to appear. Then, blank. The computer reboots and it sends me to startup repair, which cannot repair any "errors" automatically. Is there something I'm missing?

 

[Boozad]

Yes you need to perform clean install of Windows.

 

[Pauly]

Your old install was set for drivers with your old hardware, moving this to new hardware will confuse the OS on boot as it does not have the capability to deal with the new hardware that it is not expecting to see.
It is possible to port an install to new hardware but generally requires preparation on the old system before removing the HDD which is obviously not an option in your case.

It can be connected as a secondary drive and all your user files will be there but obviously none of the programs will run, Is there something in particular you are trying to save from the old HDD ?

 

[GokAy]

Hey, before you clean install, you have another option:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/292068-make-windows-7-bootable-after-motherboard-swap.html

Might be best to clean install though, still try above and see if it will help.

 

[countzero]

Well, if you're lucky you might just continue with the old drive, if you're not too exacting in your computer use. I've done it before in non critical systems. try switching the sata contoller in the bios between ide, ahci and raid, see if you can get it to boot. safe mode and installing chipset drivers might also work. some programs might not run on the new computer if they are licensend via hardware ids, others might just run.

 

[AddRAM]

You`d have better luck hooking it up to another HP, not a Dell.