Microsoft Operating system transfer between systems?

[immortality]

I'm building a bitsa PC from lots of old parts sitting around here including a left over SSD that has Windows on it from an old machine that died long ago. Can I use this SSD/Windows on my bitsa PC?

[antus]

Main thing is it needs to be close enough to the original system to boot. Then you might need drivers, and might need some kind of re-licensing due to significant hardware changes. If it cant boot it gets complicated. Depending on your use case you might be better of running vmware on a new windows install and configure a vm to use the old disk and boot the old drive as a virtual machine only when you want to use some old tools on it.

[BennVenn]

Brother says its a hardware id hash made up of all sorts of pieces, CPU ID, HDD ID etc so it'll know its not in the PC you activated. He also says that most people that just swap hdd to a new PC find it will work just fine, windows checks if the old machine is active online and if not it lets you carry on. If it is a clone (two pc's online etc) then it'll get upset

He also sent me a link to a tool to make an IOT version of windows but we probably shouldn't talk about that here.

Oh and he sent this:

cargo.png (408.79 KiB) Viewed 3573 times

[BennVenn]

Oh and if the hardware is vastly different like antus says (no GPU or completely different, same with sound card, motherboard drivers etc), it'll boot still but with no drivers, then pull them all from online and install them automatically. You may need to go back through and remove the previous drivers. Same thing happened here when I swapped video cards, it booted in what looked like safe mode, downloaded drivers and was all good, but old nvidia drivers were still in device manager.

[antus]

Sort of, if it boots your fine, but if the early boot code cant access the sata controller (was an IDE system or something) and the early stage boot fails, then you need another pc to fix it. Probably it'll just work, as soon as you see it booting your past that stage.

[immortality]

They are 2 completely different systems. Donor SSD came from a laptop.

Can only try. Still need to find some ram and a PSU

[pman92]

Your probably better off doing a fresh clean install.
You can create a bootable USB to install it with the media creation tool. It will work unactivated.

If the old system wasn't an OEM licence, then it's possible to transfer the activation key somehow I believe.

Or you can buy activation keys online for bugger all. They do work. My licenced copy of Windows 10 and Office 2019 cost me about $30 for memory.

[antus]

This one was physical, still on hand if I need to go way back....

[MudDuck514]

Antus,

Back in THOSE days, we could "wack" the registry key (boot to safe mode) for the "system" and it would reinstall ALL new hardware as if at first boot!

Mike

[Gampy]

Microsoft has provided a hardware upgrade path ...

You can replace either the hard drive, or the motherboard (bios), not both without breaking activation.

So to upgrade everything, you just do them one at a time, first you move the hard drive to the new PC, get it running, let it online so it can verify activation, once that is done, you can then move everything from the old hd to the new hd and then allow it to verify activation again ...

What sucks is if you have legacy boot versus UEFI boot ... and the motherboard doesn't support legacy, your screwed!
That is my current issue, I have 5 brand new i7-10700k's on MSI z590's setting here (for ~2 years) and I cannot use them without losing activation's.
There is more then that holding me up, like my health!

The good old days of freedom are gone!

-Enjoy