I bought a new computer with a SATA hard drive running windows 8. I want to install a second SATA hard drive running windows

surrender3few

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Jan 25, 2014
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i have a new computer running windows 8. The drive is a SATA drive. I want to add another SATA hard drive from my computer that died. This drive runs windows 7. How do I add the drive running windows 7 to the computer with the hard drive running windows 8. I want to make both drives be able to boot. That is i want to boot from either the drive running windows 8 or the added drive running windows 7. My email is man107@aol.com
 
Solution
Connect old hard drive to new computer and boot to Windows 8.
You would have to save any data from the old hard drive to your new computer's C:\.
Unhook the data and power cable from the hard drive that came with your new computer so that only the old hard drive from old computer is connected.
Boot up your new computer with the Windows 7 DVD and install Windows 7 and do a custom install and format the drive.

After Windows 7 is installed, you can then hook up the hard drive that came with your new computer.

Then you'll have to use your computer's boot options menu when booting up like F10 or F12 to select which o/s hard drive you want to boot to each time.

rmszaphod

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Jan 25, 2014
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10,530


Plug the drive into a sata port on the motherboard. Enter the BIOS or boot utility on computer at start up and select the drive you want to boot from.

This of course, assumes your dead PC had a Windows 7 Full Retail license. If it had an OEM license then doing this is a violation of the license agreement as is illegal. That said, once Win7 boots on the new hardware you will need to Re-activate Win7 within 3 days.

Cheers.
 
Connect old hard drive to new computer and boot to Windows 8.
You would have to save any data from the old hard drive to your new computer's C:\.
Unhook the data and power cable from the hard drive that came with your new computer so that only the old hard drive from old computer is connected.
Boot up your new computer with the Windows 7 DVD and install Windows 7 and do a custom install and format the drive.

After Windows 7 is installed, you can then hook up the hard drive that came with your new computer.

Then you'll have to use your computer's boot options menu when booting up like F10 or F12 to select which o/s hard drive you want to boot to each time.

 
Solution