Leon S wrote:
By doing this will I then be able to use the programs that I lost like Office, Light room, and Elements. At this point all I have regained is my documents and pictures, which I am greatful for.
Actually Yes and I do it all the time.
I have a Desktop which I use with several operating systems and 2 hard drives 1 drive is on sata2 the other is on sata0 the way I have it set up is by default it boots up sata2 but if I press f12 when it starts up I can boot sata0 instead.
Your hard drive generally is partitioned as windows loader (a hidden system partition) then your C: drive and sometimes a D: drive and a lot of systems these days have a hidden recovery partition as well so you can revert C: back to how it was when you bought it. (windows7)
with XP the boot partition was part of the c: drive. but the newer method is better.
The windows loader partition is what is loaded initially and decides what gets booted next generally there is just 1 option but its capable of booting more (my sata0 drive has a 32bit version of windows and a 64 bit version when booting windows it asks me which I want to load)
Anyway as we know PC's are upgradable and one thing we can upgrade is the hard drive with programs like partition magic you could copy and resize the original c: drive to your new bigger drive and then then take out the original C: drive and use the new drive in its place.
I do something similar on a regular basis but using a linux program called gparted. If I have 20 or so pc's to set up with windows office chrome acrobat windows updates ect. I set up one PC how it wants to be copy its partitions to a usb drive then boot the destination system with a linux cd wipe the internal hard drive and copy the partitions from the usb drive to the internal drive.
I generally have my images sized down to as small as possible because it is slow to copy say 25gb to the internal drive (about 15 minutes) if I had 50gb (25gb of free space) it would take half an hour) resizing from 25gb to say 300gb takes a few seconds
Booting up for the first time windows says it wants to run chkdisk which you should really let it go ahead and do. Once it does that then windows loads, generally the hardware is different on the new machine. So when it first loads up it says installing new hardware. If you click on the bubble it will pop up a window and you'll see it installing drivers for loads of devices. you'll probably find your monitor resolution and number of colours is wrong until its found and installed the right driver for your graphics card your mouse may freeze for a couple of minutes as it changes driver for that. But generally within 5 minutes or so it will have drivers set up and want to reboot. generally after that reboot or the next one it will want to install around 50 windows updates but once thats done I generally rename the PC (i cant have 20 pc's with the same name on the lan (and join the domain which doesnt apply to you).
Sometimes not all hardware drivers are resolved (sometimes you can just use windows update (if the network card is working) sometimes you need to hunt for drivers.
The next problem may be windows and office activation the activation state of windows and office is stored in windows loader. If I haven't copied the windows loader to the internal drive and just reused the existing one these will need reactivating.
Anyway back to your situation when you boot your computer from the laptop hard drive instead of your main one windows see's the new hardware sets up the drivers and pretty much continues as normal from there on in. You might need to reactivate windows and office but if you don't it will just nag you and turn your desktop background black and tell you that you may be running counterfeit windows.
With both drives attached you will have a C: drive and a D: drive which drive is which depends on which you booted.
But anyway yes it will work, you might have more problems with an oem version of windows than I do with volume licensed windows but you should have a working system running from your laptop drive.
To keep things simple and safer , you might prefer to unplug the hard drive from the desktop and plug the laptop drive in its place. If it all goes wrong, which it might, then you would just put the original hard drive back in returning your desktop system back to normal.
It goes without saying you are best to have backed up anything you want to keep from the laptop drive before you do this. I know what I am doing and i don't get stuck and make bad choices.
Good luck with it, as you can probably tell i'm not your average computer guy, I only wish my photography skills were as good :)