What would happen transferring a Win7 HDD on a new machine?

[mulambo]

Basically, I'm currently on an Intel dual core and I want to directly/physically transfer the current HDD where Win7 is installed into an i3 machine, making it the main boot drive.
I know I can just try it myself, but I want to know what could happen or if anybody else already did this so I can just prepare all I need or just to know if I have to avoid because it will surely crash (or the current system corrupts, etc.). Of course I know the system will need the new hardware drivers to work (beside the only things it will share with the new machine, like the video card and the hdd obviously).

 

[SIW2]

Make Windows 7 bootable after motherboard swap

 

[Megahertz07]

What generation is the i3 computer? You may need to add some drivers using the old computer before you swap

Make sure you create an drive image backup so if things go wrong you can recover.

 

[mulambo]

As suspected, but I had to try it myself: I had to make a clean reinstall because of BSOD at Windows loading (both normal and debug mode, crashing when loading CLASSPNP or something... seems like Win7 can compute a change of hard drive, but not a change of motherboard), by simply trying to make the boot from the transferred hard disk. Hopefully I had a backup of everything so I just clean re-installed, then transferred all previous programs and user data by raw copy (some programs needed to be reinstalled though). Not a perfect image of what was previously, but it seems to work fine now.

 

[siliconbeaver]

If HP PC, need to be very careful. HP PC is really problematic when swapping.
If you have to do on HP PC, need to get ready PS/2 devices (KB and mouse, at least one of them) to work on PC's PS/2 port.