Move HDD to new Computer ISSUES

I have an OLD LAPTOP, HP Envy with Windows 10 on a Firecuda HDD. The computer is so old it is not compatible with Windows 11 so I bought another Laptop,
The NEW LAPTOP is an Acer Nitro AN517-54 with no drives.

I tried to transfer the HDD to the new computer and keep getting INACCESSIBLE BOOT DRIVE. I can put the OLD HDD back into the OLD LAPTOP and it works fine.

I also tried to upgrade the NEW LAPTOP to Windows 11 using a USB created from the Windows 11 download page. It just tells me that I can not upgrade from the USB, or an ISO if I created one, and that I need to upgrade from windows.

Since I can not get windows to load on the HDD how can I get Windows 11 on this HDD and keep all my applications and data ?

You have to convert the old HDD to GPT and booting in UEFI mode. It is likely MBR now with an NTFS system partition that cannot boot in the new laptop which boots in UEFI mode.

You're trying to use a HDD in a modern laptop vs an SSD? Also sounds like you are using the incorrect USB drive to install/upgrade to Win11. You need to download the Media Creation Tool to create a proper Win11 USB installer. As mentioned by NavyLCDR you might be running into UEFI issues with booting.
I would recommend NOT using a spinning HDD and getting an SSD(Sata or NVMe) drive to run the laptop OS.

what2use said:

The computer is so old....I bought another laptop

Click to expand...

You can't slap a MBR drive into a UEFI system and expect it to boot.

Clearly a new installation is needed. Be sure to backup your files OK

*Firstly ALWAYS turn off Hibernate before trying to move a system if possible, success rates for hardware moves ~ plummet when a system is in a hibernated state

On original machine:
open an admin cmd prompt

Your boot issue can be corrected by docking the drive and using EaseUS partition master and Diskpart.

In EaseUS Partition Master, there is, to the left of the graphical disk area, a place you can "Right-Click>Convert to GPT". It does fail sometimes, but when trying to use the automatic "Right-Click>Convert to GPT" and getting an error, in absolute last ditch effort to save a system that refuses to convert over to GPT (after its been backed up elsewhere) you can use EaseUS to delete all other partitions around the Windows partition and the right-click GPT conversion should then succeed. But even if the conversion is successful without removing the partitions, you will still need to manually build an EFI partition, using diskpart, to complete the conversion to a fully bootable disk.

Once you complete the EaseUS portion:
open an admin cmd prompt

Now, assuming you dont need to update the raid drivers or remove IDE drivers for the system to be compatible, its should boot up... If not you can try to get it into safe mode, which solves most other lingering bootup issues..

Driver changes may be necessary but arent always and are very easy by combining DoubleDriver to export and DISM++ to delete/import if you end up going that route.

Or you can use Microsoft's own mbr2gpt program to do it all automatically, but it is a little bit finicky.

The Acer Nitro AN517-54 has a PCI Express Solid State Drive Interface. I understand that it is a M.2 drive.
Why don't you buy a M.2 NVMe drive, install Win 10 as UEFI-GPT and then replace the C: partition with the one you have on the HDD. You will have your win 10 on a fast NVMe SSD drive.