Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer

realmy66 said:

I have not seen anything that exactly helps me. I am replacing a dead motherboard and my old CPU but keeping all other equipment. I need to know if this should work as both boards are intel based. The old board is no longer made so I am updating with one using Z68 chipset. I use Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit and it is OEM...bought it from tiger direct when I upgraded from Vista. I do not want to lose any info on my hard drive and have no other pc to use. My husband uses Macs as he does graphic design. Should this change over work? If there is no way to make it work I am done with Microsoft. I have had so many issues over the years and very little help from them. I am hoping someone in these forums can give me some good suggestions. I enjoy being able to build my own pcs to my own specs. I am moving from a DP45SG extreme board with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU to Asus P8Z68V Pro and Intel Core i5-2500 processor. ( I have a Seagate Barracuda 1TB hard drive (sata), 2 Sony sata DVD burners, Coolmax 950w power supply, Corsair memory which I am upgrading, EVGA GeForce 9800 GT superclocked video card, and soundblaster audio card.)

Because of the fact your old motherboard is dead, you can't sysprep anymore. You have to do it in another machine. But that's not available I know. And maybe it doesn't start at all in another pc.


Harddisk was connected using serial ata, or just an IDE cable? serial ATA is most likely.

1. Try to boot from new motherboard
2. If not booting, switch from ahci to ide in BIOS or vice versa. (serial ata settings)
3. Remove all old motherboard related stuff in device manager (on board stuff like network card, graphics card, audio etc)
4. Uninstall all associated software like graphics cards configuratione utility
5. remove drivers in IDE ATA/ATAPI-controllers group
6. Install new drivers using CD that you got when buying new motherboard.

All drivers work fine? See "device management". No question marks there?
Switch back to AHCI mode (if you're in IDE mode now) AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista
S

Archquark said:

My wife has bought a new Dell XPS 8300 with Windows 7 Premium installed. She wishes to move all her programs and files from her old HP Pavilion machine with Windows 7 Professional installed to the new Dell machine. Is this possible with sysprep or will she have to use Windows easy transfer or similar program and reinstall her applications? I beleive from what I have read that sysprep appears to work only if the new machine does not contain an OS.

Thanks

Windows 7 Professional has a valid license (not OEM)?
Dell XPS 8300 and old HP Pavilion are both desktops? or laptops?

Archquark said:

we were in the process of doing a backup of her HP hard drive. It took over 10 hours as our external backup drive is only USB 2.0. We will be buying a new external backup drive with esata port for the Dell.

How did you make the backup, so with what software? What did you backup, only C-drive or all partitions?

Kaktussoft said:

How did you make the backup, so with what software? What did you backup, only C-drive or all partitions?

We used the Windows 7 backup program and backed up the original HP system drive with the system image option selected.