Hard drive exchanged, now won't boot

Gti · 28 Mar 2017 at 21:19

I've exchanged a failed laptop hard drive for one from an old but working laptop and it won't boot in to windows 7. Shows okay in BIOS, boots into startup recovery and the diagnosis says "a patch is preventing the system from starting".
None of the system restore points seem to work so how can I recover this without formatting and re-installing windows 7? I actually tried a third HD which had windows 8 installed and it took the hardware change without a problem so I don't know why this one is playing up.

andy_mk3 · 28 Mar 2017 at 21:20

You can't always swap around Windows installs from one machine to another. Similar hardware may work but generally it doesn't work, you will need to do a clean install.

demonix · 29 Mar 2017 at 17:12

andy_mk3 said:
You can't always swap around Windows installs from one machine to another. Similar hardware may work but generally it doesn't work, you will need to do a clean install.

Windows 8/8.1/10 don't crap all over the place when it comes to major changes in hardware as they go through the process of changing drivers on the first boot which is why the hard drive with windows 8 just worked while windows 7 is going mental.

The OP is more then likely going to have to reinstall the OS to get it working again.

Rannoch · 30 Mar 2017 at 13:15

Macrium redeploy, moved installations to machine with major hardware changes.

bledd · 30 Mar 2017 at 13:36

Ideally you want to reinstall Windows, you shouldn't just chop and change system drives like this.