pirana6
Go Cougs!
+691|6546|Washington St.
Ill try and keep this short.

I got a bunch of new hardware (processor, motherboard, videocard) and like an idiot I thought I could just take the hard drive out of my hold machine and plug it into the new one and everything would be hunky-dory. Well no. When I boot I can get all the way to just before windows loads and it freezes and immediately restarts.

Is there some way to get the info needed onto the hard drive that says all the info for the new components without doing a reinstall?

I have a separate drive that has been formatted and has a fresh install of win 7 on it and I hear you can just do an "upgrade" (even though it's just reinstalling it in the same place) on itself to fix the new-hardware-wtf-is-this-shit problem (on the first hard drive but now not the one I'm booting into) but when I load the Win7 install disk and click "upgrade" it only lets me upgrade the drive I'm currently booted into (in this case it's the new hard drive with the freshly installed windows 7). I can of course do the fresh install of Win7 on the separate drive but I am VERY against reinstalling all my programs and settings unless absolutely necessary.

Is there some file I can just move onto my old hard drive in the system32 folder that explains to it all the new hardware I've put in?

Or is there somewhere in the bios I can just tell my computer to tell windows it's got new stuff?

I've startup-repaired a million times (from both itself and the Win7 disk) and it doesn't work.

Plox and thank you to anybody with ideas!
Cheez
Herman is a warmaphrodite
+1,027|6694|King Of The Islands

Start the DVD.

Instead of going Install Windows, on the bottom left is Repair My Computer. It will (hopefully) automatically install your new hard drive controller (the reason Windows fails to start).

If that doesn't work, aside from more elaborate means of using Live Repair CDs to change controllers, is install Windows.

Note that in Vista and 7, installing Windows on an existing Windows partition will move aside the existing Windows to Windows.old, and install painlessly onto the drive.

You have no reason to format. You never had a reason to format, it was just that's all older Windows offered.
My state was founded by Batman. Your opinion is invalid.
pirana6
Go Cougs!
+691|6546|Washington St.
No dice.

It can't find anything wrong but still right about the time when it should say "welcome to windows" it flashes a blue screen then restarts.

Any way to change controllers? (Which I guess is what I need to do)
pirana6
Go Cougs!
+691|6546|Washington St.
reinstall. oh well I guess i'm better off in the long run
OrangeHound
Busy doing highfalutin adminy stuff ...
+1,335|6904|Washington DC

Closed at request of OP

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