The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Moving a hard drive from R1 to an R2

    Discussion in 'Alienware M11x' started by bigun08, Nov 25, 2010.

  1. bigun08

    bigun08 Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    4
    Messages:
    128
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    I bought an R2 the other day and I will be moving my 256GB SSD to the new R2 from my current R1.. what parts are different.. CPU, Chipset sound. wifi? I will remove them from devices and hope for the best.. thanks
     
    bigun08, Nov 25, 2010
    #1
  2. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

    Reputations:
    2,354
    Messages:
    4,449
    Likes Received:
    476
    Trophy Points:
    151
    From a computer perspective, there are some pretty significant changes between R1 and R2. The big ones are the motherboard resources, like the chipset and memory controller. There are others (e.g. CPU) but those are more minor.

    Older versions of Windows used to really crap out when you tried just moving hard drives across systems with drastically different motherboards, but Windows 7 is pretty resilient to this.

    I say, back up your critical data first, then just give the hard drive swapping a try. There really is no disadvantage over going straight for a clean re-install. Best case scenario, Windows 7 detects the changes, installs updated drivers, and everything just works. Worst case scenario, your machine repeatedly blue-screens, and you are forced to reinstall from scratch (which is what you would have to do anyway if you didn't try the swap first).
     
    kent1146, Nov 26, 2010
    #2