I have a 1TB external drive. It is actually an internal laptop drive I got out of my old HP Pavillion DV7 which I broke. I liked that computer so much I found the exact same model on eBay and bought it again. (By the way, the eBay laptop came with a 1TB Seagate drive, but the original one had a 1TB Toshiba drive) I have a copy of windows 8 I got for free as a student. I have Windows 7. I want to upgrade to Windows 8, but I want to be able to go back to Windows 7 at any time.
This was my evil plan:
- Create system image of Windows 7 on yet another 2TB external drive I have.
- Replace internal dv7 laptop drive with almost identical 1TB drive from old dv7 laptop (so pull it back out of the USB enclosure and stick it in my computer).
- use the Windows 7 restore CD to put the contents of my computer on the new drive just like they were on the old drive.
- do an in-place install of Windows 8.
That way I would have one hard drive with Windows 8 and one with Windows 7, and I could go back to 7 if I ever wanted.
Problem is, the laptop won't recognize the new hard drive. Both the Ubuntu live CD and the Windows restore CD don't see a hard drive. When I attempt to boot from the hard drive the computer says "Please install an operating system on your hard drive" leading me to believe the BIOS sees a hard drive, but I'm not sure.
I put the drives back how they were before and Windows 7 booted just fine and my data was still on the external-usb-enclosured drive, so the drives are still working.
Sorry if this has been asked before, I did a lot of honest Googling before I asked this. I don't usually post on sites like this.
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