Short story: my old computer bit the dust, needs a new mother board; I assume at this point that the hard drive can be rescued. I have bought a new computer. I want to copy the old hard drive to something that I can use with the new computer. Old hard drive was set up with Windows 7. New computer has Windows 8.
Question: can I take the old hard drive (as copied onto a new external hard drive, say) and use some or most or all applications on it on the new Windows 8 computer?
Does that question make sense? For example, I had old versions of Office applications on my old machine. Can I run them from that external hard drive on the new machine? That sort of thing.
I don’t really want to do anything complicated like set up dual boots, one for each OS, if I don’t have to (I would probably have to pay someone to set that up for me). On the other hand, I don’t want to lose those applications, some of them would be expensive to replace. (It’s been a very long time since I loaded them, I don’t know where the disks are either). What are my options?
I went through something like that, and was told no.
I had to re-install all my applications from scratch. In many cases, I had to contact the vendors to get new installation files. In only a few cases, I had to buy new applications entirely.
It took me a month to get all squared away. (All? Hardly! It’s been six months, and I’m still doing fine-tuning to get back to where I was.)
The only thing you’ll be able to use your old disk for is a secondary data disk. This is a good thing to have, to be sure, but it won’t be any good to you as a system disk in its current state.
(Or…maybe? You might have better luck than I had!)
Simply put, no. The programs on your old hard drive were installed on a Win7 OS with its relevant system files and registry entries. They will not work on Win8 because of different files, registry settings, paths, etc. You wouldn’t be able to do it even if the OS was the same, for the same reasons. You will either have to reinstall the programs you want on your new machine, or boot to the old hard disk if you want to use its programs.
Yeah, that’s one of the annoying things about Windows.
I think you can still do it (although I haven’t done it in many many Windows versions) if you manually copy the registry entries into the Registry and then painstakingly copy each .DLL file that it complains about the absence of, retrying a program launch after each, until it finally consents to launch. Even then your success rate won’t be 100%.
As others have said, almost certainly no. Windows requires you to install most software. The installation process does things like write to the registry and copy things like DLL files to certain directories.
If you have the old installation disks, you could install the software on the new computer. Even that can be an issue as some software only allows you to install it on one computer.
What you could do is wipe the hard drive on the new computer and clone the software on the old computer to it. Even that can be a problem as your old Windows 7 OS might not support some of the hardware on your newer computer. Also you aren’t really sure if your old hard drive even works right now.
Probably the best bet to bite the bullet and get the latest versions of the software that you will actually use.