Ok here's what I have done. My wife's computer was an old dell slower than molasses in january and then some. I took an old case that I had and moved her two drives, both sata and her dvd drive and moved them to the new system. I also added two other sata drives as slaves. One of them was her windows 7 drive from a laptop. No biggie, I set the original Dell windows 7 as the main boot drive within bios. Here comes the fun part, it should have just given me an error that hardware was changed and need to re-activate. WRONG. I removed all but the original windows 7 drive and the dvd drive from her computer (just unplugged the data cable so that the system doesn't even see them). The system tries to boot but then loads the recovery environment. I've tried startup repair and I don't remember what all I have tried. This thing is as far as I can tell a brick. If anyone has any ideas I am more than willing to hear them. What I'm looking at right at the moment, well tomorrow anyways, is a complete reinstall on that single drive and then gradually add the other ones. My wife is NOT going to be a happy camper. Clues? Ideas? bottle of the strongest whiskey known to mankind?
You will need to do a clean install, you cannot expect it to boot into a completely new hardware environment. Download drivers for the new motherboard from the manufacturer. Good luck and happy new year.
That has been my conclusion, unfortunately. Thanks I was hoping for that bottle of whiskey instead lmao
Take just the drive and only 'the' drive from the original laptop. Determine the specs of the original machine and find a replacement machine as close as possible to it. Then power it up. I have recovered several this way. I just took a HDD out of a smashed up dell vostro laptop and put it in a Dell 7010 tower and it booted up. Full recovery. --- The other option you have it to boot up a machine on a live Nix with the laptop drive as slave and run 'Nix fixboot utilities on the laptop drive. --- Time consuming but as long as the laptop drive is OK - it can be done. Need to have the replacement machine close to the original system hardware.