replacing hard drive on Lenova ThinkCentre M*3

[lional]

Hi
My church bought a Lenova ThinkCentre M*3 for the church. They would like to use their old 2Tb Hard Drive in place of the one that it came with It only seems to work with the Hard Drive that it came with. Is there a solution that would allows them to use their old hard drive that has all the programs that they use on it?
The old machine has windows 7 basic and the new one has windows 7 pro but obviously had different hardware

Any assistance/advice would be appreciated.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there lional,

These are desktop machines and the HDD, which is most probably 3.5'' should fit in.
Depending on the exact model, you need to see how many SATA slots are there.

The thing is that, you will need to reinstall both OS and applications. If you insert the old HDD in the new machine, you will get a BSOD due to the fact that the two systems have completely different software.

So, you should attach the old drive to the system -> the system will most probably boot from the new drive -> back up all the data that you need from the old drive to the new one, so it is ready for OS reinstall -> unplug the new drive(it is a good idea to have only one drive attached to the system before OS installation) -> insert the OS CD and perform clean OS installation on your old CD.

After that, you can attach the new HDD -> transfer all the data that you need to the old one -> install the apps over there.

From now on, you have an old HDD with OS(Win 7 basic) and a new drive with Win 7 pro. My suggestion would be not to erase the OS on the new drive. You can simply go to BIOS and remove the new drive from the boot order. That way, the system will boot only from the old drive.

Feel free to ask any questions.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[lional]

Hi
Thanks for your prompt response
So they can't just remove the hard drive that the machine came with and put the old one in.
Is there no way to avoid the BSOD by changing some BIOS/computer settings.

What they were trying to avoid is re-installing all the software again and resetting everything up

Thanks

Lional

 

[D_Know_WD]

Yeah I know that this is a really time consuming process. If they put the old drive in the new machine, it will simply not boot. You will get some error message.
I don't think that the clean OS install could be avoided. These are just different machines. Of course, you can wait for some more opinions.

D_Know_WD