Restore to dissimilar hardware

SIW2 said:

have you tried generalizing it ?

windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe tick generalize and reboot.

It should setup again from scratch when rebooted, you will to set up a new account, can always boot into the old account and delete the new one later on.

just a heads up, they crossposted this in the bsod forum also.

Windows freezes after migration

its their intel processor.

From what I read, generalizing will destroy the OS if you use it on an active machine....

And yes, I crossposted in BSOD at the suggestion of those in this subforum. And yes, the processor does seem to be the issue. Although I'm unclear why the freezes would have become so much less frequent over the course of the last two weeks if it were the only issue.

I wonder about N-lite-ing (or whatever the tool is these days) my install. Presumably that disk would be agnostic of the processor used to create it.

generalizing will destroy the OS if you use it on an active machine....

It has always worked fine for me. Dont know what you have been reading.

I just did it again 3 days ago on a win7 machine. The ms drivers weren't working satisfactorily for hotswap, so installed the intel rst drivers. Still not working. Sysprep generalize, reboot to oobe and while setting up it picked up the rst drivers first and now all is good.

It does the whole setting up windows routine , the same as it does on new installation, except the programs/drivers etc you had previously installed are still there. Drivers will only be installed from the windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository if windows determines they are needed.

It is possible there might be some corruption of the registry or files on your system, but if there isn't then I dont see why generalizing shouldn't work.

Generalise is mostly done to then capture the partition into a wim so it can be deployed on any machine.
The current machine is any machine. There is no need to capture and apply, rebooting into it after generalize works fine.

well, I am all backed up, so I'll give it a try!

Well, gosh that didn't work! Well it did, but I still got the same 0 to 2 crashes every day.

Guess I'm back to the recommendations on the other forum. This is indeed not possible, as they insisted there!

Just restored, and trying to save as many settings as I can before I do a clean install.

Hope maybe this helps somebody else.

cereberus said:

Here is a robust way of restoring to dissimilar hardware. You have to use dism commands

1) clean install windows to new pc first using media creation tool making sure you have IRST drivers if needed for an nvme drive available.

I assume if the install (to NVME drive on the new machine) worked, I have the needed drivers? I've done this part. It's the same computer, but I can restore the old OS easily....

cereberus said:

2) export all drivers from clean install to a usb drive using dism.

3) create custom install.wim of existing pc using dism. I also uninstall onedrive temporarily on existing drive as that sometimes causes issues, then reinstate after custom install win is created.

I'll read up on dism. I haven't used that before.

It's windows server 2022, so should be no issue with one drive (which I always have to keep removing on win10 machines....)

cereberus said:

4) inject drivers from step 2 into install.wim using dism. You may need to inject irst driver into boot.wim as well if nvme drive on new pc.

5) create a custom installation usb drive replacing install.wim and boot wim in sources directory.
As install.wim will be over 4GB, you will need to follow tutorials to do that.

Again, if the install just done from usb worked fine to nvme, I should be okay??

I just made a USB install drive for the new machine and it was much easier than it's been in the past. Just format as NTFS and copy all files over from the .iso.

So, just a simple file replace with the install and boot wim files created from the old machine? I suppose I may need a bigger drive... this file will have all my program data, correct?

6) boot from usb drive and reinstall on new pc (deleting existing partitions).

All these steps have tutorials in the tenforums tutorial selection.

The reason it is robust is that the initial clean install ensures you have all the right drivers for new device to inject into install.wim

I have used this to transfer existing installations to completely different hardware. It works every time.

Well, since I have many dozen plugins with a plethora of different kinds of copy protection, it would sure be nice not to have to reinstall and then re-authorize all of them. So I will give this a try!

THANKS!!!!

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Try3 said:

I'd just like to comment that, for item #1 in that list, you might like to note:


Test for possible NVMe missing - NavyLCdr #9 - ElevenForum
Source of necessary IRST driver - NavyLCdr #15 - ElevenForum
You then need to copy the driver to your installation USB and use a modified installation procedure to load it at the correct stage. This is described in
HP PCs - No Drives Can Be Found During Windows 10 Installation (Intel 11th Generation processors) - HP Customer Support


All the best,
Denis

This is a 5775c, Broadwell, six generations back(!) so shouldn't face that issue.... Such a great processor, pre-northbridge; for audio work it runs circles around the newer 8700k it replaced --with much lower power consumption.