Moving HDD with Windows 10 into Complete new PC.

Kari said:

+1
@Word Man, I misread your post and gave an invalid answer. My apologies. I have now deleted that reply.

Night Hawk explained this pretty well, no need to repeat that.

We missed each other's replies at the time! Actually in regards to whether or not you could see the license transferred whether or not OEM or Retail some years back I initially had to make an inquiry about having an OEM for System Builders XP cd at the time not simply the OEM pre-install you typically see on a premade system. There are the two different types of OEM in that regard. MS did activate a new custom case when dumping the old one and of course having nuked the drive clean with a security tool if not simply moving those old drives into the new case. As long as you own the new as well as old machine MS will activate it for you once you move over to the new pc. You just can no longer use the install on the old one if the drive is left behind.

The Windows media itself is tied to the machine as long as that was the same media used to install Windows at it goes and if you sell with any Windows on you have to provide the media. That also includes retail media as well as the system builders type disk since the key being the license goes with the machine. The difference however is the Retail has to see the name change for the new owner as far as the Admin account goes while with any OEM premade you have to submit the full information regarding the change of ownership. For keeping the exact same media to use on multiple machines then you are going into Volume licensing there. That would be something more often seen with a business or repair shop.

This is the part that often gets confusing for many when hearing "OEM" since you have the Dell, HP, or other OEM tied to that one machine only and then the pc for sale has to see the disk used provided with it while a custom builder can see that same OEM transferred to the next build he or she owns invalidating the previous install on the old machine. Did you know the OEM media for 10 now sees both 32bit and 64bit compared to the past 32 or 64bit only? MS made a switch there for 10.

Word Man said:

Thanks, Night Hawk. Your response is congruent with what I've advised my son. I think he should go Retail for the extra $20-$25 but he hesitates and I've distilled it down to whether he wants to keep the FPP license after he decides to build a better machine or whether he wants to sell the machine off with OEM license and get another license for his new build - he'll have to learn how to make these decisions himself once armed with good information.

Surprisingly I caught the OEM Pro on dvd at Newegg for $20 off the $140 tag on their Black Friday discount while another vendor keeps Pro priced at $125- The Home being $99- I was expecting to actually see a flash drive but got a dvd in the mail when grabbing one at Newegg. to keep both 10 and 7 together on the main build.

The retail Pro runs at $199.99 $20-$25 cheaper then seen for 7 Pro years back at $220-$225 showing MS has seen a price drop. For $125 that would be the cheaper way out if planning to sell a machine with 10 already installed. But the better move would be to simply wipe the drive and sell as is depending on buyer of course for the hardware sale and recoup for investing in both 10 and the new case.

Here I would simply plan on building multiple machines and provide the media for family or when asked help someone pick up the hardwares and put it together for them. That would still take a call in to MS however to have them instruct him on how to bring up the 8 groups of 5 digits over the phone once explaining why he is transferring 10 over to the next build. Then he simply explains why the drive in the old case had to be wiped clean prior to selling it. The pricing as well as editions can be looked over at Newegg before making any final decision since the price gap between the Retail and OEM is bit more then a $20-$25 difference as you will see. Buy Microsoft Windows Ultimate, Professional, Home & More - Newegg.com

That's a $60 gap seen there. Yet when selecting the 64bit OEM option I ended up with both 32bit and 64bit options seen when checking the dvd out. You still need to specify the 64bit however so you don't end up with a 32bit only media.

Night Hawk said:

...
This is the part that often gets confusing for many when hearing "OEM" since you have the Dell, HP, or other OEM tied to that one machine only and then the pc for sale has to see the disk used provided with it while a custom builder can see that same OEM transferred to the next build he or she owns invalidating the previous install on the old machine. Did you know the OEM media for 10 now sees both 32bit and 64bit compared to the past 32 or 64bit only? MS made a switch there for 10.

...
The pricing as well as editions can be looked over at Newegg before making any final decision since the price gap between the Retail and OEM is bit more then a $20-$25 difference as you will see. Buy Microsoft Windows Ultimate, Professional, Home & More - Newegg.com

That's a $60 gap seen there....

Understood and appreciated, Night Hawk. The $20-$25 price differential I mentioned was strictly our scoping out of the Home editions, not Pro.

It's a fine point for me, not having been aware, that he can get OEM ($100 at Newegg, I see) and install on current machine and keep that as he changes parts (even MB, with Microsoft intervention perhaps needed), or remove OEM entirely from current system and reinstall on a newly built system (selling hardware only of old system) have I got that right?

If the old system isn't actually that old but recent and hasn't seen much use before deciding a newer build is wanted The $100 or $140 at Newegg or Get this now ... $85 for 10 Home or $125 for 10 Pro electronic download without physical media however is another penny saver found at Windows 10 Download

They knocked 23% ioff of the usual OEM price there. The site looks rather new however as one thing I should mention since they don't actually have too much else besides office wares and some av softwares listed in addition to having 10 only under the OS section until you go to the home page and find 7 Pro and 8.1 Pro also being sold as downloads.

Here I actually had to use the MC tool anyways to burn four dvds for both 32/64bit flavors of Home and Pro initially with a 7 Home Premium laptop not able to boot from any usb device and preset to boot from optical first as for any recovery media. I dropped the upgrade on first and then some clean installs to go from the 32bit 7 OEM to 64bit 10 Home there. But that was where the free upgrade came in handy since I bought the laptop and maintain it for someone else.

For your son one idea that comes to mind would be simply grabbing a new drive along with the purchase of 10 to toss on a totally clean install on the new build simply selling the old with the upgrade left on there. A working pc with an OS will fetch a better price when sold. The new 10 key purchased would simply be applied to the fresh 10 install on the new drive on the new build. Both buyer and seller made happy! Just a thought anyways if that saw the upgrade replaced with a recent clean install. Simply backup and then nuke personal files and rename the admin to what the customer wants!

Night Hawk said:

...
For your son one idea that comes to mind would be simply grabbing a new drive along with the purchase of 10 to toss on a totally clean install on the new build simply selling the old with the upgrade left on there. A working pc with an OS will fetch a better price when sold. The new 10 key purchased would simply be applied to the fresh 10 install on the new drive on the new build. Both buyer and seller made happy! Just a thought anyways if that saw the upgrade replaced with a recent clean install. Simply backup and then nuke personal files and rename the admin to what the customer wants!

Thanks, Night Hawk - actually his HDD is Microsoft "virgin", has seen only Linux. $85 is certainly an attractive price for 10 Home OEM - I can check out rep of redboxsoftware for him while he saves up for his purchase in the next couple of weeks.

It would be good to know about that particular site for sure since I do not like referring people to "unknowns"! I've been burned a few times between ordering a micro-atx board from a site that came up on a legit shopping site of all places but proved to be a scam! and with another type of technology the site was traced back to Hong Kong and was another take your money and run!

When contacting security for the credit card I was told the lame brain who set up the soon to be gone site attempted to make a $2,600 purchase in Turkey with a prepaid debit card? "Sorry Bozo but I was only out the $100..." or so on the card at the time! I got $40 back from the insurance the provider offers being a partial recoup and why I prefer to screen first! Some are made to look real good with the "https" in the address! At Newegg however you have the choice of usb flash drive or optical media for full retail while the OEM came on dvd with the options for both 32bit or 64bit when selecting 64bit.

Here's a catch! The OEM media is likely the 10240 presently while it might be the Threshold if these places were restocked by chance. The Media Creation tool however is sure to download the latest 10586 Threshold 2 Update that came out last month. Simply use the same key but not the same media to be 100% of the TH2 going on!

I know this is an old thread but using sysprep on Windows 10 then moving the drive to another computer usually works except if you are going from Pentium dual core/Core2Duo to a more modern i3/i5/i7 system. Whenever I do this on any HP/Dell system, Windows 10 hangs at boot with the spinning circle of dots. If anyone knows how to get past this, please post here.

UPDATE: This issue occurred because there were bogus CDROM drives in the class properties. After I disconnected the CDROM and removed them from the registry. All worked normally.
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e965-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}

jimmyt said:

Inspired by your post, I went ahead and moved my SSD & HD from my existing computer to a new computer (who came with minuscule SSD & HD), without running sysprep. It was an easy success. Thanks!

Since almost two years ago when this thread was last active, the generalizing method was the "officially recommended" method to move existing installation to new hardware.

Today it's almost impossible to generalize existing Windows 10 installation. So called app provisioning prevents it. It's still the preferred method when creating custom Windows images for deployment but that requires a clean installed Windows 10 booted to Audit Mode before any user profiles have been created.

Luckily, during this time Windows 10 has also become more and more robust and can in most cases adapt to new hardware without issues. Even I myself, a Sysprep freak will no longer (since Anniversary Update version 1607) try to generalize an existing Windows 10 installation because of the above mentioned provisioning issue.

Kari