I've got a Dell Inspiron 1545 on which the screen has died. I'm able to plug an external monitor into the Inspiron 1545 and it works fine, so the screen is the only issue. The OS is Win7.

I'm trying to move the disk to a spare Dell Precision M90 laptop that I've got lying around.

The problem is that almost as soon as the Windows logo appears in the boot sequence I get a BSOD with a STOP 0x0000007B message. Researching this message pointed to issues with SATA AHCI mode.

I looked in the BIOS of the Inspiron 1545 and the controller was set to AHCI mode. I set it to ATA mode and tried to boot with the same drive and got the same result as on the Precision M90. Switching back to AHCI allowed the machine to boot correctly again.

I checked the BIOS on the Precision M90 and it doesn't seem to support AHCI mode, although it is a SATA controller onboard. The BIOS is the latest A08 version available from Dell.

Is there any way I can get this drive to boot in the M90 without reformatting it?