swapping hard drives between PXI-8115 and PXI-8105 won't boot up

[jcarmody]

I have a test system running Windows XP on PXI-8105.  I've upgraded the entire test system for another project and need to upgrade my existing systems; the upgrade runs on Windows 7 and PXI-8115.  I have new hard drives with Windows 7 and the new test software which were loaded/configured/tested on a PXI-8115, but I need to retrofit the PXI-8105 with them.  This doesn't work.  Windows begins to boot but fails and tries over and over again.  In an effort to take the PXI-8105 off-line to troubleshoot, I replaced it with one of the PXI-8115 and the old (WinXP) drive.  This didn't boot up, either.

Here's a summary of my situation:

• An old system has PXI-8105 running WinXP
• A new system has PXI -8115 running Win7
• A hard drive (with Win7) from the PXI-8115 won't boot on the PXI-8105
• A hard drive (with WinXP) from the PXI-8105 won't boot on the PXI-8115

What is different between the two PXI controllers that keeps me from swapping hard drives?

[jcarmody]

A little more information:

• The chassis are PXI-1042
• It didn't boot when I tried with only the controller plugged in (all I/O unplugged)

[jcarmody]

More information:

• I just found that Win7 isn't supported on the PXI-8105
• http://forums.ni.com/t5/PXI/PXI-8105-with-Windows7/td-p/2805618

This doesn't explain why the (32-bit) WinXP hard drive doesn't work in the PXI-8115, though.

[Josh_KNH]

A couple thoughts:

1. Windows 7 probably works fine on a PXI-8105. Although NI never officially supported or shipped that configuration, I suspect that the default Windows 7 installation contains enough of the driver support needed to boot up.

2. In general, Windows is not very tolerant of swapping hard drives between completely different systems, especially with Windows XP and prior. Consider whether just installing fresh and copying over what you need is faster than trying to do this, but if you must, I would suspect that Windows 7 would be more tolerant of the swap.

3. As a debugging step, try pressing 'F8' during the boot process to launch the Windows boot menu and try safe mode or some of the other options.  More information here.

4. If all else fails, Google is your friend here as there's nothing particularly specific about this being an NI product that you need to know when attempting this operation. Any information you find online about swapping hard drives between PCs should be relevant to your situation. Searching for 'swap hard drive to new computer windows 7' gave some useful hits on the first page. Beyond that, you can also look into using the 'sysprep' utility to try and clean the system and prepare for swapping to a new PC.

[Intaris]

Maybe AHCI and IDE drive settings in the BIOS not matching the installed OS on the disks.  I have this issue between PCs, regardless of the OSes involved.  Even moving from a Win7 Pro to a Win 7 Pro PC can be a headache if you don't take steps to make sure BOTH hard drive subsystem drivers are installed.  Windows is extremely careless and always only installs ONE.

I use a program called MergeIDE from the heise.de website to make sure the PC being migrated bas both IDE and AHCI support.  It's in german so beware.

[jcarmody · Accepted solution]

A technician with "the knack" discovered a device driver conflict.  We deleted that driver and Windows was able to use a generic driver to boot correctly.  Bob is my uncle.