Question about my computer's hard drive?

[proudcattle993]

I have a 4-year old laptop HP Pavilion DV7 that quit working out of the blue. You can hear it start up, but the screen stays black. I've tried hard resetting it a million times. It does not work. The computer had some structural damage too, where it stopped opening and closing easily until a piece popped off (I have two kids using it for homework). Maybe I shouldn't have done this, but I purchased the exact computer (a used one for a couple hundred bucks) so that I could just switch my hard drive out to avoid losing everything that was on the other computer. So that's my background, but here are my questions.

1. The original computer's caps lock light is blinking one time intermittently. I read in HP's code list that this means the CPU is bad, which is probably why my screen is black. If so, does that affect my hard drive?

2. What if I install the hard drive in the replacement computer? Will everything be on there including printers and drivers I've downloaded? My understanding is that it will be my computer just in a different "shell"

3. The replacement computer I bought won't connect to the internet as is, even though I know it should. A network driver is uninstalled, and I can't detect any networks to connect to, so I can't go online and install it. So I'm hoping that by installing my other hard drive, that issue will be fixed. If not, there's no point in doing it. My wireless connection is working fine on all the other devices in the house.

[Jess W]

You cannot hurt the replacement computer by trying to swap the hard drives. And if it is a an identical model then it should work. Even in the identical make and models they would have a different machine id, but I do not believe Operating Systems utilize this. Machine ID's are mainly for scanned images, pictures and other media that is produced on a particular machine, this is so it could be traced to a particular computer. However people have to have new motherboards and cpus installed all the time, you would essentially be doing the same thing. Good Luck! and let me know how it worked.

p.s. it wouldn't hurt to try the replacement drive in your old computer either.

[Timbuk4]

The difficulty opening and closing the laptop may indicate that your Video Cable has unplugged.
Connect the laptop to a desktop monitor or TV with a VGA or HDMI cable.

If you use a TV, open the inputs menu and select the input you plugged into.
fn+F4 is the video output selector key combo for HP Laptops.

Hard Drive Swap may be simpler if you don't have video cables. Since the laptop you bought boots, then it should do the same with your hard drive in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBXfygWz-Mw

[Virginia]

You need to have somebody look at it.

[tumbleweed_biff]

1. CPU failure does not affect the hard drive.
2. Assuming everything on the new shell is exactly the same hardware then yes, it will work just fine.
3. Assuming the WiFi and network adapters in the new shell function properly then yes, the drivers will already be installed and functioning when you boot the old drive.