Restoring MR to another device

I've always found W10 installations being very forgiving when moved from one device to another. Make sure the internet is connected on first boot and W10 updates to the new drivers and off it goes.

However, I'm trying to restore an image from a standard SSD installation to a device with NVMe which requires drivers before W10 will boot. I have the drivers which I use(d) with the clean install, but how do I get the NVMe drivers installed when restoring an MR image.

(The image is successfully restored, I've checked that. It's just that on boot there are no NVMe drivers installed so W10 can't see the storage medium)

Apologies, not near the "old" device from whence cometh the image, so can't check the version, but it is anally and meticulously updated manually and frequently

Hi.

I believe you need to build a USB or CD-R Boot Medium with the drivers to inject them into the OS.
UEFI must be enabled in the BIOS, too.

FYI -

It's just a matter of getting the MVMe drivers into the boot drive so they can be detected.

Perhaps creating a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive and boot from the drive in UEFI mode.
After that, you can do a repair install of Windows to the NVMe drive.

Just an idea.

Unless you have the paid version of Reflect, this is difficult to do.

A different approach is to use dism and create custom install.iso of existing installation, burn that to a usb drive, install nvme drivers (and any other key drivers) into install.wim and boot.wim on usb drive, then boot from custom installer.

This sounds difficult, but there are excellent tutorials from @Kari.


1) Create Windows 10 ISO image from Existing Installation | Tutorials (tenforums.com)
Use part 2 followed by part 4.

2) Create bootable USB installer if install.wim is greater than 4GB | Tutorials (tenforums.com)
This is needed as install.wim is greater than 4GB

3) DISM - Add or Remove Drivers on an Offline Image - Windows 10 Forums (tenforums.com)
You have to add drivers to boot.wim - tutorial shows how to do it for install.wim - steps are same for boot.wim i.e. substitute boot.wim in commands.

I used this to copy the installation of my old amd/ssd laptop to my new i7/nvme optane laptop and it worked first time.

The only slightly tricky bit I had was when creating custom iso in Step 1, I had to temporarily uninstall onedrive (does not affect files online), do above, then reinstall onedrive on new pc.

If you like learning, this was actually quite rewarding as well.

@cereberus -

Great information to have in your back pocket.

Thanks, mate!

NavyLCDR said:

You cannot do a repair installation if you are booting from the USB flash drive. You can only do a repair instalation from within the installed OS. I've seen that on many threads, "Just boot from the USB flash drive and do a repair install." Except it can't work that way.

How to Boot or Repair Windows computer using the Installation Media

I believe that I did it on a system with no recovery partition.
Don't think it was a Clean Install.

I will try it on a test system.