ok, so my computer some time ago went to fluff on me. when i'd start i'd get past the bios and then black screen with blinking cursor at the top left hand corner of the screen.

now i went to google and i searched all this and i tried it all and eventually just settled (after everything else didn't work) on installing a new version of windows seven (from vista) on the drive.

i did this by physically putting my hard drive into another computer, saving what files i wanted to keep and then reformatting and installing 7.

with the two drives in the one computer on start up it would ask me which one i wanted to load (two options, the working computers existing vista or my new seven off my hdd). I used both on the second computer, loaded everything just fine on both, took my hard drive back and put it back in my computer.

went to bios, set to recognize to boot from the hdd, the only one in, no cd or usb connected or anything else to try and boot from, only the hdd that i had Seven working on moments before, now again loads into black screen with blinking cursor.

second computer it loads wonderful, my original computer it doesn't load at all. i have set to failsafe defaults in bios, in case i switched something by accident.

anybody have any ideas?

i found the answer, something about a hardware abstraction layer and the install setting the hal to specifics of one computer, not the other..

so i'm off to buy a blank dvd to try to install from that, and we'll see if it works :(

yeah. when you install windows, it installs all the stuff for your mobo and other hardware. you cant just swap master drives and expect them to boot. I mean it has happened, but the setups have to be somewhat similar

do a clean install and you should be fine

i get the same problem alot, and i just format/reinstall and im good to go

yea clean install is best. you'll need sata-drivers during installation so download those and put those to usb-stick.

if its corrupted file clean install fixes it but if hdd has probs then .......

when i have the vista hdd in the working computer i didn't need sata drivers during installation. why might i need them now?

if its manufacturers cd then those drivers are on cd.

that if you have sata-drive not ide.

you can certainly install windows to a hard drive on one PC and toss it in another. windows installs only basic drivers for video output and such. you just have to install the drivers for whatever motherboard you have the HDD installed on.

burned the iso to a dvd and it worked just fine, i was just wanting to do it without going to the store, so i took what i had available

it works now though, and luckily did not need sata drivers for whatever reason

then sata is set on bios to emulate ide (compability mode usually). works fine unless you have alot hdd action then it is slower than normal sata.

also, marshal, as i realized after the fact- for the 7 in the second computer, i wouldn't have needed sata drivers because they would be have been available from the existing vista- or different drives/different os's means different drivers?

unless os was installed by manufacturer or some guy/chick at computer store doubt sata-mode was on, if you do upgrade from vista to 7 and vista has sata-drivers installed then it hdd works in sata-mode w/o giving drivers.

interesting

Braden is on the mark. Microsoft OS's use a hardware abstraction layer to smooth the ease of programming for themselves so that they don't have to code individually for every device, they rely on the OS to provide the translation.

Thus, when the system is first installed it sets itself up for the hardware that it was installed on, trying to start it up on another system with a different processor, etc., is simply NOT going to work.