Changing hardware on sql 2008 causes issues?

Does anyone know if you change hardware on sql 2008 you will run into issues?

I had a user who had their screen go bad on their laptop. So I grab a spare machine, hop in the car and drive 80 minutes to their office. I pull the hard drive from the old laptop, put it in the new laptop, and boot it up. Everything looks good. So I head back to the office.

Hour later they call, and say they cannot use some of their programs that require sql 2008. Getting an error 3417. I researched the error, did everything others have found that worked to fix it, but it didnt for me.

The laptop that has the old drive is identical in all features to the old one. Same make, model, processor, memory, etc. I know SQL does not like if you change the machine name after it is installed, but this is the first instance I have seen where you can not swap the hard drive.

Anyone care to comment on this?

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Comments

blargoe

I bet that it wasn't working before they called you, and wanted to see if you'd fall for "your work broke their SQL program".

There is no reason why what you did would break just SQL applications.

brad-

it may if the partition scheme was different. Are we talking a vanilla install of SQL Express or what?

za3bour

Did you try SQL before you went back ? I suspect as well that it wasn't working before. Changing hardware could cause problems to sql and other applications but if it was exactly the same I don't think there is a chance of a problem.

What version of SQL are they using ? have you looked at logfiles/even viewer for more details about the error ?

RobertKaucher

I had SQL Server Developer edition (i.e. Enterprise) on my laptop. It died and I swapped the HDD to an entirely different machine (AMD to Intel) and did not have an issue. Have you checked the accounts running the SQL Server Service? Try creating a new user account on the local machine to run the services. Also make sure the drive did not some how get compressed. Viruses and idiot users do that a lot.

tiersten

What the others have said. I've swapped out hardware before on systems that ran SQL Server and it didn't even blink.

blargoe

Partitioning shouldn't be relevant here... he used the same disk and just swapped it into a spare computer of "presumably" identical hardware.