Put family's HDD in my gaming computer since I'm leaving, boots to an underscore

[johnettm]

Hey everyone, yes I absolutely looked at various threads about this and haven't come across a solution that works for me yet.

So I'm leaving home to go on a trip for a while and my family plays games kind of so I figured I would put their hard drive in my computer so they could play games and stuff. So I took out my 3tb HDD, 120GB SSD and 60GB SSD and put their hybrid drive into my computer where the 120GB SSD plugs were. The computer boots but just ends up on a black screen with blinking underscore.

I do not having any discs or back up things from my computer since it was years ago. They bought their computer with windows 8 several years ago and recently upgraded to 10 for free and as far as I know they don't have any backups of any kind.

Their computer was working perfectly fine before I turned it off and took out the drive, so I doubt the drive is bad. I took out the drive and put it into other sata and power plugs, none worked all still go to the underscore screen.

I'm thinking worst case I can just plug their drive back into their original computer and thats that but I really want them to have my computer.

I'm hoping im just missing some simple step since I know for sure all parts involved should be in good health as they were all working before I did this. Please someone help? =) Thank you!

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there johnettm,

You can't really expect a proper boot, as the OS was installed on another system, with completely different hardware.
Your options are:
- Put the drive back in the old computer.
- Install some of the games in question to your computer.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD

 

[jamhi]

The windows OS is set to hardware parameters it was installed to for security reasons, you might be able to go into safe mode and get the drivers for the other computer that way but the windows install will need to be re-activated, there is a good chance it wont work at all. The OS never likes hot swapping full rigs in my experience.