Question about hard drive swaps

tswarthog

Solid State Member
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Ok this summer I plan to rid myself of this dell xps 420 and self build a new rig running with an I7.

My question is that with the new motherboards, chip set, graphics card, ram, ext. Is it possible to take out my hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it and boot a new system off that hard drive (more detail below)

Right now I have an internal sata 500 gig that has windows 7 installed and a bunch of programs that were annoying to install and would like to avoid re-installing. I also have a internal drive set up for pure storage that is a sata 1.5T.
The 1.5T is backed up on an external drive so the data inside that one is not as important. My goal is to set up my new computer so that I can still use the internal 500gig as my main drive so I will not have to re-install all my software/programs, or back up all the data.

Would the motherboard be able to boot just normally off the 500 gig or would I have to do something like install windows 7 again on my 1.5 terra, then when the system can run windows 7, switch the 500 gig to be the main drive?

In advance I am sorry for the scatershot way of presenting the information, however any help is appreciated
 
I highly doubt that it will boot correctly. The Dell installation is highly proprietary and looks for specific Dell branded items before fully loading. A full reinstall with a new copy of the OS is the way to go. Be sure to back up all need information. Besides, it's not legal to transfer the Dell OS software to a non Dell branded machine.

Q. Can I transfer my operating system license from an old PC to a new one?
A. Not unless it was purchased as a Full-Packaged Product from a retail store (i.e., Windows in a box). Current OEM licenses for all Microsoft operating system products are not transferable from one machine to another.
 
I highly doubt that it will boot correctly. The Dell installation is highly proprietary and looks for specific Dell branded items before fully loading. A full reinstall with a new copy of the OS is the way to go. Be sure to back up all need information. Besides, it's not legal to transfer the Dell OS software to a non Dell branded machine.

So even if I had installed a full version of windows 7 (not from dell) to replace vista (that the computer came with) the hard drive is just going to be to dell specific to put into a fresh rig?

If that is the case I might go buy a 7,200 rpm terra and use that for the main drive, slap in my 5,900 rpm 1.5T and clear the 500g and use both of those for just storage.

Now I have to go find all my dang visual novel .iso files and back them up =/

tnx for the help though.
 
If you had installed Windows 7 that you have purchased separately, then all you would need to do is to do a repair install of Windows 7 after transferring the drive to the new computer.

I had assumed that you were using the Dell OEM Windows 7 installation.
 
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