Bbearen, Coochin and all the others in this forum:
Thank you!!!!!! While my problem was solved via other means (see below), I appreciate the massive amount of teaching you gave me. Thank you!!!!!!!!
The original problem was why my old Win7 Home Professional hard drive would not boot on a Dell Precision T5610.
One issue was that the Precision has 2 physical CPUs. At the very least, I would have to upgrade to Win7 Professional. My Home Professional was 64-bit, which helped.
But nothing suggested in this forum was able to get the old Studio 435T/9000 hard drive boot on this sytem, although it booted OK in an Optiplex 990 at work.
Dell listened to my issue and they did some research. The old hard drive was not compatible with the motherboard on the Precision unless I did a complete reinstall of Win7 Pro on it. That was a deal-killer.
As noted, I am in the middle of a major home renovation with install CDs for the PC buried. It would be a massive problem to find the few installs I did have. Lots of money to replace software.
Dell guaranteed that the XPS 8700 would work with my old hard drive.
It did, except the old hard drive did not see the integrated NIC on the motherboard. Dell said that was because win 8.1 was “injected” into the motherboard and there would be issues that could not be overcome. They sent me a link to the drivers. But I also realized I would also install a separate NIC. But after installing the drivers, my old hard drive picked them up and I was on the Internet.
To-do list: My OS drive is MBR and my data drive is 2 TB. There is no compelling reason for me (as far as I can see) to convert to GPT. Anyone disagree?
I also have a 512GB SSD. i want to migrate to that for my OS.
Again, thank you to everyone who has contributed to this forum. Your help has been fantastic.
