Transferring a Hard Drive from an old computer to a new one

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Bacchus451

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Hey there, thanks in advance for any help.

My grandparents had an old Compaq computer with a 40gb Maxtor hard drive. I decided on buying them a barebones and building it a new one for them, and just recycling their old hard drive so they didn't lose or have to back up anything. The computer seems to work fine, except windows won't boot. It recognizes the hard drive and that windows is on it as the start-up option menu appears, but after I click on Safe Mode for example, it just reboots.
 
Put the windows CD in and run a "windows repair" on it. Currently when you are trying to boot, the system is trying to load the drivers of the OLD computer's motherboard, and this is why it can't load into windows.

Running the repair will HOPEFULLY work, and load in the new drivers for the new system. If not, you will need to reinstall windows from scratch.
 
Hard drives are cheap. Buy a new drive, load windows on it and use the old drive as a slave.... with all their old data intact. Just change the jumper on the drives. You will skip all the old driver issues, motherboard, video, audio, etc. that try to load on startup.
Monton
 
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