re: booting Vista from a Lenovo hard drive installed in a HP

Dear Community,

I have a question concerning laptop hard drive swapping. Hopefully I did not put this in the wrong area, as I believe my concern is more of a software issue rather than hardware; I apologize in advance if I have made a mistake.
Here is the situation:

1. I have a hard drive from my Lenovo T61, whose GPU and LCD has failed. It has Vista Business. ("Lenovo hard drive")

2. I will soon have in my possession a HP dv4t.

3. Can I swap the HP hard drive with the Lenovo hard drive and start up the HP laptop successfully? Two reasons for this. One is to thoroughly extract my data (such as program configurations and my former Vista configuration). Two, I may soon start a job where I have to bring my computer to work everyday and I would like have a "work" hard drive and a "home" hard drive- I want to just swap hard drives.

I have "tested" this idea by trying to boot the Lenovo hard drive (in an enclosure) via USB on a HP G60t. After the screen where you see the rolling green bar, I got a BSOD and the laptop restarted.

So is my idea doomed? In a worst case scenario, can I create recovery disks on the HP dv4t and use that to clean install Vista onto the Lenovo hard drive? What are my options?

Thank you very much for your help.


Sincerely,
Joe

 

No, you can't swap the HDDs.

Different motherboards will require reactivation (which you don't get - its an OEM copy I suspect) - and different hardware that will need different drivers etc.

I suggest you buy an HDD enclosure and then just connect the old driver to the HP like an external HDD - this will work and will allow you to extract any data.

Also, as you HP comes with an installation of Vista, you'll have a working laptop too!

 

Just a minor technicality, so the OP fully understands. You can swap the HDD's you just can't swap the operating systems. He could reformat the Lenovo HD and use it in the Dell machine without any issues. That way he could have a work hard drive and a personal hard drive.


Gary

 

Ah yes, true. Although I don't hink he wants that as he talks about salvaging data.

He could reinstal on the C partition - but that's also where too many people keep their files...

 

Actually it was the second part of his needs (see above). Once he uses some external enclosure, as you suggested, to get his data off the drive, he can reformat the Lenovo drive, install the OS from the dell system restore media (or a clone of the dell drive using Acronis) and then swap between the drives for work and personal use. I used to have an old AT&T laptop that had an easily accessible/removable hard drive and did the very same thing for a couple of years. It was quite nice to have stuff so separated.

Gary

 

Thank you DetlevCM and ScuderiaConchiglia for your replies!

I shall follow your advice. Once my new HP laptop comes, I will first extract all my data from the Lenovo hard drive. Then I will format the Lenovo hard drive. Then I will clone my HP hard drive onto the Lenovo hard drive.

Thank you again.