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November 9th, 2016 18:00
Moving Dell hard drive onto an Alienware
In short, I have 2 old laptops, one I used for a short period of time (Alienware) and one I used for a lot of important stuff. I'm looking to access the data on my old dell, since it broke, over to my alienware, so I simply swapped the hard drives. Only issue is, whenever it starts up, I just get a blinking underscore like it's incapable of loading. They're both Windows. Can anyone offer any help?
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DELL-Chris M
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November 10th, 2016 09:00
If the laptops are NOT the exact same models, you cannot simply move a boot HDD (hard disk drive) from one to the other.
Put the Alienware HDD back in the Alienware Laptop. Make sure it boots correctly into Windows. You then need to purchase an external enclosure for the other laptop HDD that then connects to the Alienware USB port. Then you may copy the data from the external HDD to the Alienware HDD. But, if any of the data is tied to a specific program that was installed on the old HDD, those programs will need to be installed on the Alienware Laptop to see that data.
hindesite
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November 10th, 2016 15:00
Heh, just move your data over from your backups :-)
Unless your laptops are really, really old (like Windows 98/ME old) you can't just swap the drives over. With older, DOS based Windows, you sometimes could.
What ever you do, do not make any changes to the drive that has your data on it, don't let Windows do anything at all to it.
Be sure to buy an external dock that matches your drive type, you can then use your spare drive for backups in future.