Trying to put an old hard drive with windows 7 in a new computer

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Adorey

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Oct 24, 2013
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So, I was helping my friend build his computer and we decided that to save money and files, we'd simply take the old hard drive from the previous computer and put it into the new one since it already has windows 7 on it as well as various files.

When booting up the computer, it blue screens for half a second and says that there was an error during startup. All the parts appear to be functioning, as we are able to save a backup from the hard drive onto an external drive.

So, we really don't know what's wrong here. If anyone could lend some advice, we'd appreciate it.
 
Solution
A
you cannot move a hard drive that was the boot drive from one computer to another, the windows license is tied to the original computer it was originally installed and used in. It will not work in a different computer.
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animal

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Jan 23, 2010
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you cannot move a hard drive that was the boot drive from one computer to another, the windows license is tied to the original computer it was originally installed and used in. It will not work in a different computer.
 
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chrisso

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Nov 17, 2013
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This is not quite as simple as that, but it depends on lots of things. If the chipset was similar enough it may boot. If the windows license on the old drive was a retail license it may boot and ask for you to re enter the license key. This would result in a slightly problematic fire up of the new machine.
If the old license was O.E.M.
(In other words from a Dell or something) the likelyhood is you are doomed to fail one way or another.
 
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