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sasforgeFlag for United States of America

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Reuse Hard Drive with Vista

Why am I unable to use a hard drive that came out of a Vista machine in a new machine. Not sure if the original Vista was 64-bit or 32-bit, but it shouldn't matter - or should it. New machine as purchased , is Win 7 Home 64-bit
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hathehariken
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hmm, can you post a screenshot of the disk management tab??

Click the Blue Windows logo on the left corner of the Windows task bar
Click the Control Panel located on the right side of the Windows menu
Once the Control Panel menu window opens, click System and Security located in the top left corner (for those with Control Panel viewed by icon: click Administrative Tools)
In System and Security, locate Administrative Tools. Click Create and format hard disk partitions (in icon view: double click Computer Management. In the left pane, select Disk Management)
Because the hardware is too different, it will blue screen, you can try running a startup repair.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial148.html

Keep in mind after doing the startup repair on this HD in the new machine, you won't be able to boot it from the old machine. You could end up with the vista drive not being able to boot on either machine.

I would recommend using the easy transfer wizard and keeping the Win 7 hard drive in the new machine.
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ASKER

Sorry for the delays --- system issues.
Anyway -- here's the entire story.
Customer has 6 HP Slimlines that have issues with motherboards, overheating etc. Rather than keep throwing good money after bad, we decided to by a couple normal size towers, put in the current Vista hard drives, and continue running with new hardware.
I have a screenshot of the health of the hard drive -- it shows healthy. I did a chkdsk on it after numerous auto fix attempts by the Vista and then tried in the new hardware and still nothing -- wants to fix itself

I slaved it in the new box and all data is accessible

Doc1.docx
the problem is that you have 2 active partitions, as well as 2 system partitions.
windows is confused.

what is would recommend, is that you first attach the slave drive (300gb) in an USB enclosure.
then "take ownership" of all the data
then you copy over the data to a temporary storage location and format the drive.
then copy back and use normally.

by formatting, i mean delete the partitions and create new ones.
Thank You for the reply!

My goal is to just install the Vista hard drive in the new box rather than do as you suggest. I did not want to have to move data from Vista drive to Win 7 drive -- just a wholesale change of the hardware.

Pop the old drive (Vista) into the new box, boot the new machine to Vista and continue with my business
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Lordy123
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Thanks for reaffirming