Windows 7: Make Windows 7 bootable after motherboard swap

It's included in Paragon Imaging apps I believe, but that was the only time when we had a free standalone boot disk and it has worked so well we preserved it since it was never any more than freeware in that form.

Got it. Thanks.

I used it. It worked fine but after a solid day of running the drive after it got everything installed for the new Intel MB, I got the Activation required popup. I did this with a clone test drive to see what would happen before I did it for real.

What's the risk in going from an older Intel MB / CPU to a newer if I just let (a clone of my) existing drive reinstall what it had to without doing either the sysprep or PAR activity?

It often will not work, due to a convergence of mismatched drivers, Hardware ID and Security ID. The failure is most often during the driver-loading phase when the startup animation occurs and stalls. It is these hurdles which PAR strips out, only supplying the critical storage driver needed to actually make the hard drive recognized. The rest of the drivers swap out in a cascade after it starts, from the Win7 driver store and Windows Update.

Kaktussoft may have a slightly different view of what transpires but this is what I've picked up afte using it several dozen times a year since 2010 release without a failure.

I rarely see any discussion of the Restore Image feature which will restore a Win7 backup image while making these same adjustments. The Boot Corrector has also worked for me before, although I favor confirming Partition Marked Active then running Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times to jumpstart any boot problems.

I have run Paragon 3 times and Windows repair 3 times and I still get the error

windows\system32\drivers\acpi.sys

windows failed to load because a critical system driver is missing or corrupt

any thought on how to fix this??

If I reinstalled Win7 would I lose any of my programs or other stuff

Thanks,
Al

Well, in the case of going from a cloned disk from my recloned E8400 Core Duo to testing on my new MB it didn't appear to have worked. I just tried this after seeing that PAR worked. I started in Safe mode and it bombed out immediately... an incompatible device error. I guess in my case I'll have to use sysprep or PAR.

So if your Motherboard has died (mine) and I have a hard drive which I want to install/move to a new system - I was recommended this as the possible only option.

It is Windows 7 64 and I just can't figure out how to make this work. I have a desktop that is Windows 7 64 and 2 laptops , 1 Windows 7 64 and 1 Windows 7 32. I think I have a hard drive enclosure somewhere if I can find it that could hook up to one of these. Is that the only way for this to work? This has just gotten my brain

Install the hard drive into the PC where you want it or where it will fit. If you plan to have another hard drive attached then unplug it temporarily while you boot the PAR disk to follow steps in tutorial.

It will not be able to work in a EFI System so if your current install on there has an EFI System partition when you view in Disk Mgmt, you'll need to enter BIOS setup to enable CSM, Legacy BIOS, and set Legacy install to boot first.

When Win7 starts monitor swapping out all drivers from System Tray until all are ready for reboot, then at reboot Check for Updates and install all Important and Optional Updates.

EFI system? Do you mean UEFI? That's how I ended up on this board in the first place. How to Install Windows 7 Using the "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface" (UEFI)

One thing led to another and another. Yes, my newish laptop has or will have had Windows 8. I know I have to get rid of it first but I wanted to retain the UEFI if possible since I will be running Windows 7 64 pro which is installed in the Hard Drive. I never knew this was such a nightmare. I just thought you just stuck the old Hard Drive in a new laptop and you were up and running. LOL

Did you read the tutorial?

As far as I know PAR standalone disk in tutorial doesn't work with UEFI. However various imaging apps have adaptive restore built in if you want to try to transfer an install to different hardware, and most of the latest support UEFI.