Win7 onto spare hard disk?

[tony draper]

I have windows 7 home premium on my machine having a few probs with it at the mo,in the past with windows XP all I did was format the disk and reload the operating system clean.
Can I do this with Win 7? as I understand it it can only be loaded and activated on one machine so if I say bought a spare hard disk and loaded my win 7 on same which I always did in the past, would it identify it as a different machine because the HD is different and tell me to buggah off when re register it?
:confused:

[mixture]

tony,

You seem to be contradicting yourself here.

Para 1 you describe a standard rebuild.

Para 2 you describe using Windows 7 on a different machine.

One is acceptable under licensing rules, the other is not. What exactly is your plan ?

If a rebuild. Buy a new drive, install in same machine. Install Windows 7. Mount your duff drive on your new Windows as a secondary non-boot drive to enable you to pull files off that.

If your confused wording was building on one and then moving the drive back accross..... there is no point building a new install on one machine and then looking to take the newly built drive back to the original computer. Just build it on the original computer in the first place.

[tony draper]

Yer one was a tad confused,what I want is win 7 on a different hard disk created in the same machine,I've alway kept a spare hard disk with a clean operating system outside the machine,this is the first puter I've built with win 7,never had any probs doing this with xp.:)

[jimtherev]

I've successfully used a machine in the early days of W7 with '7 on one hard drive and XP on another. Switched in the 'order of boot' in BIOS when I needed to / felt like it.
These days, now I've proved to myself that W7 does all it says on the tin I've discarded the XP.

The authentication process counts the number of components which have been swapped (used to be 4 IIRC) before it concludes you are using a new machine, so, yes, your idea should work with no trouble at all.

[lomapaseo]

I didn't understand the question either

What I do is to clone the Win 7 on a new disk in the machine that I intend to use it in. I have also built a new Win 7 directly in the machine and then set it aside to use later.

A few months back my wifes Dell XP700 machine with Win XP went tits up with a fried montherboard (nothing new there) I took my Dell XP710 with a XP OS and swapped in her HD and was surprised that it worked almost flawlessly (it needed a driver for her different monitor). It sure saved a lot of work reloading all her programs. I kinda suspected that it's easier to swap same OS between similar Dell computers even with completely different programs, printers, monitors etc. (note: experience related and not rule based info)

[Milo Minderbinder]

tony
changing a hard drive should not trigger a problem
changing a hard drive and a motherboard probably wouldn't
changing a hard drive and a graphics card would......

but even if it did, going through the phone activation process and providing the "correct" answers will resolve any problems

[parabellum]

but even if it did, going through the phone activation process and
providing the "correct" answers will resolve any problems


Done that a few times, seems to work well, provided 1 always gives the correct answer!;)

[Milo Minderbinder]

Yes, one can always resolve that.