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Windows won't boot

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by faye-howard

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I've just moved a hard drive from one computer to another. In both cases it is the only hard drive in use.

The jumper is in the right place and all of the cables are connected properly. I've checked and the hard drive is set up correctly as far as I can see in the bios.

The only problem is that when I start up the new machine, it says that windows failed to start correct because of changes to the hardware or software. It won't start in any mode and I don't know how to solve the problem. I've even put the hard drive back into the original machine and it still starts up fine.

Any ideas on a fix??

5 replies

by thumbsup2

As you discovered, Windows detected a hardware change and won't boot. If you have the original CD that came with the machine that it NOW sits on (not the one that it came out of), you can try doing a repair install of Windows. However, if it's a recovery CD, it may well wipe the drive at the very minimum and possibly won't work at all because it might be looking for a restore partition on the drive.

by tintoman

That is to say that when windows is installed it becomes hardware dependant, therefore if you transfer the drive to another machine it will not boot, unless the hardware set up is exactly the same on both machines.
It does not matter that the hard drive you have is the only one in use, the license for the windows installation is for a single processor.
If you are sure you have a license to run it you can boot the new machine from the windows installation cd, follow the prompts all the way through to accepting the license agreement.
Then choose the option to repair the current installation.
Be aware though that you might lose the drivers for any peripheral and some on board devices so you will need the motherboard driver disk.
Also you will lose all the windows updates you had and will have to download them all again and install them.

by oh smeg

Fit HDD to new Computer.

Get Windows Install Disc and place in Optical Drive.

Start computer and enter BIOS. Set Boot Order to Floppy, Optical Drive and finally HDD where you have a Floppy.

Do a In Place Install of Windows.

After you finish this procedure the System will boot and run correctly.

Col

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