Operation System Not Found XPS13

Question

I bought an XPS13 4GB RAM 512GB HD L321X (Win 7) and quickly found 4GB was not sufficient.  So, I picked up a used XPS13 8GB RAM 128GB HD L322X (Win 8) and swapped hard drives.  Of course, that wasn't as easy as I thought, but ultimately the L322X now is working with the 512 GB HD. Now the issue.  I am driving to get the 128GB HD orginally from the L322X Win 8 machine to work on the L321X Win 7 machine. I get the error, 'Operation System Not Found' when attempting to boot from the transferred HD.  I noticed immediately the BIOS are different, as I have no UEFI boot options on the L321X.  I checked to see if Dell has different bios for the L321X for Win 7 and Win 8, but they seem to be the same. Anyway, my theory is the 128GB HD is somehow secure and can't be booted without UEFI. I'd prefer not to go buy a new HD for this thing.  Any suggestions would be most helpful.

Fuego-27 · Answer

Ok, I did try to install win 7, was able to boot to cd. However, it won't recognize the disk.

ejn63 · Answer

Windows 8 was shipped with secure boot on in the newer system - you can make the hardware work but will need to do a manual reload of Windows. You cannot take WIndows 8 from one system and transplant it to another one.

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