Dont know if this has been mentioned here before, but you can move win 7 harddisk from one system to another without reinstalling, even in systems with completely different hardwares. Windows will automagically rebuild itself to match cpu, motherboard, addon cards... You couldnt do this to vista or xp...
It didn't have you reactivate either? Was your copy already activated or still in 30-day mode when you moved it?
This probably worked ever since PlugAndPlay has been implemented. (The first time i did this was with Millennium, which happened to be on a used harddrive i bought.) From my experience, whether it succeeds or not merely depends on what hardware there was on the old system and what hardware there is on the new system. This goes especially for the IDE controllers as the installed driver has to be able to drive the new controller for the system to be able to install the new stuff. (Obviously.) If the installed driver can not handle the new controller period then the procedure will fail since access to the harddrive will eventually fail. (Bluescreen.) The rest sort of 'depends' but i found it to be uncritical in all cases where i tried this...
Don't think they forgot. It's not in their nature to forget things. Must be another reason for it... Anyway, it's interesting
Which is precisely the problem. Different chipsets from different manufacturers means they all have different harddrive controllers (and/or implementations thereof) ergo none of them is intercompatible with the other, ergo bluescreen. Believe it or dont believe it...i have no reason to tell you invented nonsense...
So could it not be then, that in win7 these chipset drivers and hardwarecontroller drivers are automaticly reinstalled with the right ones when switching hardware... EDIT : just a guess
Win7 apparently has a fallback-mode now that can work around this issue. But i had to try it myself first to say something definitive...right now i can only speak about the older systems...
Well... My Win 7 is a "lightened" version, so something is maybe missing... but my "WINDOWS/wisxs" folder is about 2,4 GB, so you have so many driver ready for an hardware upgrade that a thing like that could be even possible... And it has been done just to give us the better compatibility with all the thousands of different hardware in the market. I installed Win 7 on maybe 20-30 different PC, and i don't remember the need to use a Chipset, Lan or SATA driver to have Win 7 ready to work... As soon as new MoBo chipset come out, we maybe won't be able to do it, but as long as your hardware driver are built-in into those 3GB folder, there shouldn't be any problem.
And my point was that you are misinterpreting this because such a 'protection' did de-facto never exist! Not in Vista, not in XP, and not in any other Windows OS with PnP abilities! But since you obviously neither listen nor care, be welcome to whatever you prefer to believe. In the end its all the same to me...
Swapping system disks may work using an Acronis image+Universal Restore. Haven't tried it in a Win7 environment yet tho... netRAT.
Besides of possible HAL problem, I can't see (read: I'm not aware yet?!) of problems. May need new HW scan and drivers (other than boot time requirements), but should work. Possible problems may arise because certain (1-x?) different BIOS settings. Other than that, it sould be easy go... Hints: ACPI, ACHI... Yeah... be careful what you change, becayse chaning the wrong setting does not only prevent you booting to Windows, but may prevent you booting at all. If you don't know what you're messing with, don't change it. My advice? If you want to learn things, make good backups FIRST! Prepare emergency boot media. Then, experiment after reading all you can find about BIOS. Even the... if it breaks into pieces, they're all yours! Frankly... as usually, if you have any doubts, don't do it.