You would have do reinstall windows 7 because of drivers and stuff so its pretty recommended but it wont do any harm if it doesnt work.

TTKModz wrote You would have do reinstall windows 7 because of drivers and stuff so its pretty recommended but it wont do any harm if it doesnt work.

*skips over what he said about stuff he thought he lost*

Don't do what he said, windows 7 is outdated and you can get w10 for free and it optimizes well on older hardware as I've noticed in more recent examples. You could try it, i highly doubt it will work but you could, plug it in and select it to boot into from BIOS and it could load. Or you could do the different method, and if you have another sata power/data cable just hook it up, and mount the drive inside of windows, and get your data back if you didn't encrypt the drive.

TTKModz is right, you can't just install the new HDD and everything will work fine, especially on Windows 7. Windows 10 is more lenient, however I'd still recommend installing a fresh OS.

First make sure you back up all of your data that you don't want to be lost when performing a fresh install.

Head over to the Microsoft website and enter in your Windows 7 key [ Register or Signin to view external links. ] to download a Windows 7 ISO.

(If you're unsure of your product key, you can download [ Register or Signin to view external links. ] to find it within your system).

Once you have downloaded the Windows 7 ISO, download [ Register or Signin to view external links. ] to mount the ISO to a flash drive or CD.

If you have any questions feel free to PM me.

Mitochondria wrote

TTKModz wrote You would have do reinstall windows 7 because of drivers and stuff so its pretty recommended but it wont do any harm if it doesnt work.

*skips over what he said about stuff he thought he lost*

Don't do what he said, windows 7 is outdated and you can get w10 for free and it optimizes well on older hardware as I've noticed in more recent examples. You could try it, i highly doubt it will work but you could, plug it in and select it to boot into from BIOS and it could load. Or you could do the different method, and if you have another sata power/data cable just hook it up, and mount the drive inside of windows, and get your data back if you didn't encrypt the drive.

I can't find anywhere I can download it for free anymore. When I tried to get it yesterday it said I need a license key which I don't have.

Daddy- wrote I can't find anywhere I can download it for free anymore. When I tried to get it yesterday it said I need a license key which I don't have.

You can find it [ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Daddy- wrote

Okay so i'm not sure if any of you saw my thread about the 20$ computer I bought on Letgo, but it's been giving me some issues.

So Randomly I started getting this error message that says "Windows has encountered a critical error and will restart in one minute." so I tried everything to fix that and still nothing worked, If anyone knows how to fix this pls help.

So anyways, I have a harddrive from my old PC with windows 7 ultimate on it and a whole bunch of old files and pictures I thought I lost when My computer shit the bed. So can I just straight swap the harddrives and it'll work? I've never done this before and need some enlightening.

You can just plug it in, and it will probably work fine. But like what was said above, you'll receive a lot of driver issues etc. and some files may not be accessible. It's not recommended but I have done it only as a back up hard drive for my old files. My steam runs through it also.