Question: I had a guy bring me a computer to fix. Some low budget HP p.o.s. that had a laptop mobo in it, stock.
He had the yellow light on his case suggesting hardware failure. After inserting a different hard drive, I got the same results. Fan and heat sink were a little dirty so I figure he fried his CPU, which is soldered into the board.
So I stuck his hard drive into a different unit and tried to boot to it. Nope. Just for grins I stuck a second hard drive with an operating system on it and booted to it. Then I opened the crashed hard drive and was able to save his data.
So how can it be both to crashed to boot to yet retain recoverable data?
Answer:
Is there a way to get around this? Or is it a security feature?
Its not a security feature, it is just the way Windows works and is installed.
A random Windows install often (but not always) fails when presented with all different hardware.
If it fails to boot up, there is no way around it, especially with the only copy of a customers data.
There are 3 basic possibilities when doing this:
It boots up just fineIt fails completelyIt boots up, but you’re chasing issues for weeks/months.I’ve seen all 3.
You’ve found #2. And the greater the difference between the systems, the less likely it is to simply ‘work’.
There is no magic to make it work.