New G75VW owner - Want to use existing HDD with Win 7

[zapwall]

Hey all,

I just bought an ASUS G75VW-AH71 for a great deal yesterday and am really excited to join this awesome community :cool:.

I am still waiting to receive my machine probably next week but am really looking forward to getting my hands around modding it as per my needs. My old laptop has Win 7 with all the development software and applications that I use day-to-day and would hate having to go through the whole process of re-doing all of the installation and setup all over again that too on Win 8 :eek:. So I was planning to move the Win 7 hdd to the empty HDD slot in the ASUS G75 Notebook and using it as the primary drive and making the one with Win 8 that came with the G75 as the secondary.

I am not sure whether I can do this simply through the settings in the BIOS or have to do something else for it to work :confused:. Please share your experience if you have done this. Pardon me if this has been discussed before and kindly let me know if there are any links for that.

Also I have a desktop - a Dell Zino PC that I bought 2 years back with Win 7 on top of an AMD chipset. I was wondering if its possible at all to use the Win 8 HDD from the G75 as the primary drive on my Dell PC so that I can play around with and get familiar with it. Do they lock the drive to the laptop during the initial install and if so should I move to the dell PC before running the Win 8 for the first time itself? What if I wanted to keep shifting this drive back and forth between my desktop and the G75? Is it even possible?

[Clintlgm]

I think you will have problems with drivers trying to use a OS from another notebook. I know you will trying to use the win 8 on a desktop computer. Chipset drivers mainly but most other hard ware drivers also.
Your best bet is to clean install win 7 to a 256 gb SSD, then transfer over your data files, You can then use your Win 8 drive as a Data Drive. I would download Asus Backtracker and create a restore USB Chip first thing. Download the Win7 drivers from Asus Download, You will find all the info you need to accomplish the Clean Install in this thread You will need to use the Intel USB 3.0 drivers, Win 8 has a native MS USB 3.0. Good Luck and let us know how it goes.

[zapwall]

Thanks a lot for your suggestion. I am thinking of going the SSD path in the future. Its a headache by itself to get all the development tools working as they are within a short span. Right now I wanted to be able to just plug in everything I have from my current drive and not having to worry about doing fresh installations for that reason. My old laptop is also a 64-bit using an Intel chipset. Do you think there would be a problem if I download and install drivers for the G75 chipset for Win 7 64-bit on this install?

[Clintlgm]

Well I can't say for sure but yes I think that moving a OS drive from another notebook will be problematic. MS will also have issues with that and Validation which surly you will have to do as the new hardware is recognized by the OS. There is software that will allow and Disk Image to restore to different hardware. Acronis is one using their Disk Director and AHI and Plus pack. Acronis will work good on BIOS MBR disk, not so for UEFI GPT disk. Then you will still need to deal with MS moving your OS to new hardware. I would Definitely use the backtracker program to create a USB Recovery Media if you have a failure you will have a way to restore back to factory condition.

If you try to just put in your old notebook OS Drive let us know what happens I would really take out your stock HD before attempting this you don't want to lose what you have. Again I would get a good current Disk Image of your old NB OS Hard Drive before attempting this just incase things go bad you don't want to lose what you have!

[Prostar_Compute]

It's rare you can move an existing installation of Windows to another build. The HAL will almost always yield a BSOD or other booting issues once POST hands priority over to the boot manager. The only way you can get away with it easily is if you're moving the drive with Windows onto an identical system.

Also, the G75VW uses the HM77 Intel chipset. 🙂