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.

    Old HDD as 2nd drive and OS

    Discussion in 'Sager and Clevo' started by Sibelius1, Sep 23, 2010.

  1. Sibelius1

    Sibelius1 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    37
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Hi,

    I have just ordered a 8760 as a replacement for my old laptop that died a couple of weeks ago, and I have ordered the new machine a single HDD and without an OS.

    My question is will I be able to install my old HDD as the 2nd drive, change the BIOS to boot from the 2nd HDD and boot up my old windows that way?
     
  2. Noctilum

    Noctilum Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    161
    Messages:
    429
    Likes Received:
    11
    Trophy Points:
    31
    I have used an old hard drive that had Windows XP on it as the primary just so I could get some data off. I had tons of driver issues that gave me BSoD's nearly every time it got passed the Windows loading screen. It worked enough for me to get the data but it was nowhere near stable for general use.
     
  3. NovaH

    NovaH Company Representative

    Reputations:
    111
    Messages:
    414
    Likes Received:
    2
    Trophy Points:
    31
    The short answer is maybe. The long answer is Yes.

    First off your old hard drive has to be a SATA, or else it won't work in the 8760. Secondly it depends if the O/S installation from your old laptop will have the disk controller drivers to boot from the new laptop. Otherwise it will blue screen during bootup.

    What o/s was your old laptop running?
    Worse case scenario, you can run a repair installation of windows and 90% of the time you can salvage all your programs.

    If you need help on how to do this let me know.