Need your advice on a migration of an old laptop to a newer laptop

Max Pen · 03 Jan 2021

Hello,

I'm helping someone who has bought a new laptop but wants his windows on his old laptop transferred to this new laptop. This means all documents, programs, users , etc...

I told him to install macrium reflect free on both the old and new laptop and run on each a system image.

Now I know that macrium paid version has a redeploy feature to new hardware, is this what he needs to do this migration succesfully? If it fails then we can just restore the new laptop with the image backup right?

What about windows keys? He couldn't find any product key on this new laptop and on the sticker it wasn't mentioned either. Even running magical jelly beans key finder didn't produce any results of keys on the new laptop.

If anyone can help me what I need to do or am missing here to ensure a smooth migration that would be great.

His old laptop windows runs on the 20H2 and the new laptop on a older version.

I do not want to risk making his new laptop unbootable so please help me. Am I risking this should I try to restore the image of his old laptop on his new laptop with macrium reflect free?

Samuria · 03 Jan 2021

It can be very dodgy as the old pc is registered to the hardware depending on the licence type it may fail to activate on the new one and the old laptop cant have the same licence. Depending on lots of factors like disk setting and device drivers it may be a big mistake. 10 is good at finding drivers but you cant be sure. You would need to take an image of the new pc so you can role back.

My advice would be dont do it lots of setting etc will sync if your using ms account and set it to sync

RolandJS · 04 Jan 2021

Samuria is spot on!! Concerning the new laptop, make a full image of all partitions onto external usb media of your choosing. Probably a good idea to also make full images of the OS partitions and the data partition of the old laptop onto external usb media. I use external usb platter-driven 1TB HDDs, however, you choose what you believe is best.
I think once the new laptop is fully operational OS-wise, fully functional as to working with the documents, etc., then wipe the old laptop, Sumaria is right, one cannot have one license on two computers.
You might want to keep the external usb devices containing the full image backups of both laptops only with you. Because if anything goes wrong, it may not be your fault, however, it will very likely be your problem.

NavyLCDR · 04 Jan 2021

Regarding Windows activation and licenses, on both laptops look at the activation window under Settings, Updates & Security:

Need your advice on a migration of an old laptop to a newer laptop-capture.jpg

As long as both computers have the same Windows Edition, and both computers say Activated with a digital license, then there will be no problems with Windows Activations. Other programs such as Microsoft Office may detect the change in computers and deactivate themselves. You will have to reactive them individually.

Definitely save an image off ALL partitions from the new laptop onto an external drive using Macrium Reflect Free. Also make sure that you have a Macrium Reflect Rescue Drive created and that the new laptop can boot from it into Macrium Reflect. Two roadblocks will keep you from transferring an image from the old laptop to the new laptop.

1. UEFI v. legacy BIOS. It is easiest if both computers are booting in the same mode, either legacy BIOS (CSM mode) which will be booting from an MBR disk or UEFI mode which will be booting from a GPT disk. If you know what you are doing, it is easy to transfer the image between the two modes of booting - if you know what you are doing.

2. Certain hardware drivers could cause a failure to boot on the new computer, especially those associated with SATA controller mode, IDE v. AHCI v. RAID. RAID is the biggest problem. In order to minimize this it's a good idea to set the old computer to boot into safe mode. Option #2 Step 5 of this tutorial:
Boot into Safe Mode on Windows 10

Once you are set to boot into safe mode, then shutdown the old computer by holding down the Shift key when you click on Shutdown from the power options on the start menu. Reboot the old computer using the Macrium Reflect Rescue Drive, and then save an image of the old computer hard drive to an external USB drive.

Boot the new computer from the Macrium Reflect Rescue Drive, erase the internal drive on the new computer, restore the image from the old computer to the new computer. Reboot from the internal drive and it should boot into safe mode. Restore normal booting by doing Option #2 Step 4 of the above tutorial. Keep your fingers and toes crossed and reboot the new computer into normal Windows.

Winuser · 04 Jan 2021

Samuria said:

It can be very dodgy as the old pc is registered to the hardware depending on the licence type it may fail to activate on the new one and the old laptop cant have the same licence. Depending on lots of factors like disk setting and device drivers it may be a big mistake. 10 is good at finding drivers but you cant be sure. You would need to take an image of the new pc so you can role back.

My advice would be dont do it lots of setting etc will sync if your using ms account and set it to sync

If they both are running the same version of Windows 10 shouldn't it activate from the key on the motherboard. Drivers may be a problem though.

RolandJS · 05 Jan 2021

"...Also make sure that you have a Macrium Reflect Rescue Drive created and that the new laptop can boot from it into Macrium Reflect..." Regardless of which backup/restore programs one uses, what NavyLCDR posted are golden words upon a silver platter. This is a very critical step of the backup process, because, sooner or later, most of us are going to do a Restore.