I was handed a hard drive today and told to make a clone. The clone is supposed to be inserted in a workstation and booted up. I've never seen the hardware from the original, but I'm certain it doesn't match that of the workstation. The cloning went smoothly, but when ever I boot the clone it brings up system repair. No matter what I select, it is impossible to recover the system. It cites hardware changes, so maybe because the workstation is different, it won't boot? How can I get a working, bootable copy of this hard drive? I'm open to anything including converting it to a VM. Using NTFS on Windows 7 SP1.
1 Answers
First the disk should be bootable but it seems it is the case (and this is generally correctly fixed by the Windows Repair process).
Second, Windows must have the correct driver for the hard disk controller (usually referred as "mass storage controller").
If, for example, in the case of a sata drive, the original workstation use a standard Intel AHCI hard disk controller but the new workstation use a enhanced SATA 6Gb from marvel, then windows doesn't have the proper driver for this new controller and will fail to boot.
So you have to identify the disk controller, find the correct driver for it and install it on the windows.
A quick search give me this forum for example for a procedure to install such a driver offline, (however I didn't test it and cannot guarantee this work) : http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=24245
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