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Question

Moving hard drive to another laptop.

by Jul 3, 2018 7:14PM PDT

My older Acer laptop crashed (mb damage but was told hd is fine and files are recoverable).
I took out the hard drive and installed it in my other Acer laptop. This other Acer laptop now fails with "no bootable device - hit any key".

I'm not sure why this would be. BIOS correctly auto identifies the new hd being a Toshiba/Sata drive. This was the bootable drive in my older laptop. I was expecting I would be able to boot this other Acer laptop with this drive.

Is there anything that I have missed or is there any step that needs to be performed when a drive is installed? Is it possible that drive can communicate with BIOS to allow its identification but be otherwise damaged?

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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Answer
Windows doesn't move like this.
by Forum moderator Jul 3, 2018 8:32PM PDT

It's also expensive. You can try google and these words but you need another license of Windows if that is what you want to run. Here's the words. Remember, few get it to work again.

"How to change motherboards and save Windows."

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Answer
Well the error no bootable device
by Jul 17, 2018 5:32AM PDT

means no bootable OS was found. What do you mean by you took the drive and installed it in your other Acer? It would work better if you leave the original boot drive in and get a USB case for the drive from the other machine. They are available cheap at Newegg.

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Answer
Also you can't take an OEM Windows on
by Jul 17, 2018 5:34AM PDT

a hard and moving it to another pc and expect it to be activated on the second computer. OEM Windows are tied to the machines they are installed on. But the the error your getting means if didn't find a bootable OS which doesn't have anything to do with whether Windows is activated.

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