Reloading applications from a crashed drive

Question

A friend called today in a state of panic. He had taken his old Windows 7 laptop into Frys and asked them to clone his old drive onto his new SSD drive. They reported to him (I have not seen this myself as I was not there) that they did as requested. However, now, both drives blue screen @ boot up.

They claim that the PCP board probably was on its 'last legs' and failed @ just the worst time imaginable.

I am fairly certain I know the answer to the following question but just in case...

Is there a way to recover his applications from the old drive, move them to the new drive after W7 is re-installed there, and re-install his old applications from the new drive? Providing he has the proper credentials, product codes, etc...

My answer would be 'no' due to the process one must navigate to install an application.

A million thanks,

Mike

Answer 1

However, now, both drives blue screen at boot up.

This part sadly contains not enough information to do anything constructive with. A blue screen on boot could be minor filesystem corruption (fixed by doing an fsck/checkdisk), or it could go all the way up to permanently damaged hardware with no options to recover.

Is there a way to recover his applications from the old drive,

Usually not. In the old DOS days you could simply move a folder. But these days information is stored in many different locations. It is not just %program_files%, but also registry hives and possibly somewhere in your userdirectory.

Providing he has the proper credentials, product codes, etc...

If he has all those then there is nothing stopping your friend from installing a nice clean windows 7 OS on the SSD, followed by installing the applications. All that is needed for that is the SSD (undamaged), the windows 7 install disk, the CoA '5 group code' and the relevant programs and keys for that. Hopefully your friend still has the install CDs.

The real question is not if the programs can be restored, but if unbacked up user data can be restored. For that I sadly return to the beginning of the post: Not enough information.