moving hard drive from one computer to another

[gomblue]

I am doing a clean installation of Windows 7 on a work computer. (along with reinstalling programs and files)

In order to save time (or so I thought), I performed the clean installation on a computer at home, and then intended to move the hard drive to the work computer.

It all went well until I put the hard drive into the work computer and turned it on. The Windows 7 startup repair came up. It wasn't able to repair things. So, it not been able to boot successfully.

There must have been some settings now on the hard drive from the home computer that are interfering with it working on the work computer? Device manager settings, or drivers?

Am I going to need to start from scratch, this time doing the clean install directly on the work computer?

Booting the work computer from the installation disk didn't seem to do anything. It wants to do the clean install again.

Thank you!

[Jeff - Wolfpaw Hosting]

Re: moving hard drive from one computer to another

Hi Gomblue - generally speaking I've only been able to accomplish what you set out to do when the motherboards of the two computers were exactly the same or at a minimum with the same chipsets and same family of CPU. Windows usually needs drivers for the computer's chipset, video cards, audio, etc which are loaded during the install. Your clean install loaded drivers suitable for your home computer but not the drivers needed for your office machine.

The one thing you can try is to boot the office machine in 'safe mode'. Hold the F8 key during the boot process. Safe mode loads a minimum set of drivers. It may allow you start windows and then load the rest of the drivers needed from the office computer's Window's disk.

[gomblue]

Re: moving hard drive from one computer to another

Thank you Jeffrey. I'll try safe-mode first, and if that doesn't work, I'll start over.