Win 7 booting problems

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kcducttaper

New Member
I got a 'new' laptop the other day and pulled my working SSD from my old laptop and dropped it in my new one. I half expected to fix a few problems before getting it up and running, but I didn't figure it would be THIS much trouble.

Story goes, on the first boot, it got up to the swirly windows screen for a little bit, BSOD'd and shut off. I made a bootable USB and went in to repair the installation. It couldn't find a Win installation. I went in to the command prompt and did all of the bootrec /rebuildbcd, fixboot, etc to no avail. I even tried the nuclear holocaust method on this site, but it gets hung up at "bcdedit.exe /import c:\boot\bcd.temp" saying something like the file does not exist - even though I can see it there. Currently, the boot error screen has the standard "Win failed to start. A recent hardware/software change may have caused this...... File:\Boot\BCD Status: 0xc000000f Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data."

Something that has crossed my mind is that the laptop originally had a mSATA 32GB SSD raided with a regular SATA 500GB platter-style drive (why they chose that combo is beyond me). I didn't change any raid settings - I just yanked both drives and plopped my SSD in the SATA slot expecting that the system would realize the RAID was no longer set up and would dump the RAID settings. Was that a stupid, or is there something else going on? I really don't want to reinstall windows on this thing.
 
So you put a drive in it that had windows already installed from a previous system and you expect it to boot into windows? Doesn't work like that. Disable raid in the bios and then fresh install windows.
 
Ahh...but it does work like that with enough tweaking. I've done it before (I just can't remember what the heck I did to make it work :mad:). Perhaps I just got lucky that time, but I would really prefer to get this done without doing a fresh install because it takes too long to get everything reinstalled and copied back over.

I've heard of people doing a Win install, but stopping it right after the 'copying files' bit finishes in order to build the boot stuff. That doesn't really seem like it would work terribly well - mostly because I believe it reformats whatever drive you're installing it on, which would wipe the data anyways. Does anyone have any experience with this?

I've got another idea. I could do a fresh install of Win on the 32GB SSD and then copy over the boot stuff to my 'real' HD. Sure, I'd get some errors, but after changing the drive path and fixing stuff, it seems like that might work. The new boot stuff should at least have the correct hardware serial number and what not, or is that all in the registry?
 
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In my opinion, you are wasting time trying to get this to work when hardware is different and most likely activation won't work. Using a retail version of an OS would work, but you are using an OEM version and it won't reactivate with different hardware. Save you a lot of headache by just reinstalling windows.
 
It's actually not OEM. It's a student version from my college's site, so it should be able to activate 10 times (according to my cousin who did some contract work with Microsoft). Supposedly, the activation limits reset after a while too, so 'theoretically', I should be fine on the licensing stuff.
 
After a thorough thinking it over, I've started copying my entire C: drive to my external via command line (yes, it is taking longer than a sloth running a marathon) with the intent of having my data backed up if I do decide (or am forced) to do a fresh install. I would like to get a few more opinions though before I wipe it all. A fresh install is nice in terms of getting rid of bloatware, but I'd rather not have to reinstall and spend a day and a half just installing updates, installing my programs again, copying my documents (and program resources, so I don't have to reconfigure all of my programs again), etc.
 
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