Windows 7 Moving Win7 boot drive to another desktop

[elliptic]

Hi,

I've a friend with a dead win7 system. She was working fine until the disk drive started spinning for a long period while system was idle. So she turned it off and now can't boot, no fan activity, etc. I've two similar machines, one intel-based and one with an amd processor. I plan to go over and take out the drive to see if the system comes on and if so will deal with a dead drive. But would any damage occur if I booted up the drive in another system. All three have one hard disk (SATA). Maybe 10 years ago I tried this with a cloned drive in a different cpu architecture and as I recall windows mangled the disk contents at boot. Thanks for any advice.

 

[patcooke]

If all you intend doing is to try and boot the machine you should not suffer any damage to the hard drive but I would always back up any important data stored there. Whether or not the pc will actually boot from the drive depends on hardware compatibilities. You should first try booting into safe mode to try and minimise possible BSODs.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I'm always pushing this, but you might want to boot to a Ubuntu disk and see if you can access the hard drive from it.
It would indicate that the computer is working and allow you to backup any data on it before you try booting it on another computer.

Otherwise you may want to plug the drive into another computer using a USB converter and back the data up that way.

I'm guessing that it won't boot on another computer, the hardware won't be the same configuration, and you'll probably run into a bunch of conflicts with drivers.

On the other hand Ubuntu seems to boot on anything I plug the disk into so maybe there's a chance it would work.

Meet Ubuntu | Ubuntu

Anyway here's where you can get Ubuntu it's free and you should be able to download it and make a disk in a half hour. I always have one around for emergencies.

Mike