ISO guide for migrating to a new PC

Hello Hello!

I'm finally retiring my Core 2 Duo that I built almost 15 years ago. Yeah, about that ...

The amount of stuff I've accumulated in 15 year and the amount of software and settings. It's alot and who really wants to go through it all and reclick tickboxes and manipulate a million drop down menus.

The license is simple I already sought that out and it's fairly straight forward.

I'm under the impression that if I backup my C:\%HOMEPATH%\*.* and then reinstall app on my new PC then restore the backup. I'd be good, yeah?

I'll now have the ability to store image backups. It'd been nice to have an image for this but didn't have the facilities to house it all.

Appreciate the help! New rig won't be put together for another couple of weeks, cannot wait!

Thanks for your assistance!
Dave

Edition Windows 10 ProVersion 20H2Installed on ‎6/‎13/‎2020OS build 19042.844Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.2020.0

Hello Handler and welcome to TF ,

I would use Macrium Backup to create an image of the entire PC. Then you can mount and browse that image on the new PC and cherry-pick any files out of it you want. I will post a link within a few moments ........

Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect and there are many tutorials on how to use MR on YouTube.

You should install MR on your current PC and become familiar with making a full image and mounting it from withing MR to browse it like you would do on the new PC to retrieve files from it. Also make a bootable MR Rescue USB from within the MR app.

Have questions, ask

Why not move the physical drive from the old PC to the new PC?

NavyLCDR said:

Why not move the physical drive from the old PC to the new PC?

I've personally never tried that for a boot drive. Have you and was it pretty smooth doing that?

steve108 said:

I've personally never tried that for a boot drive. Have you and was it pretty smooth doing that?

When NavyLCDR says "Why not move the physical drive from the old PC to the new PC?" maybe he means just add the current drive as a second drive to the new machine, not as the boot drive, assuming you are buying a desktop computer and not a laptop. That's what I've done after buying a new desktop, adding the couple of HDDs from my older pc to the new pc.
John

Install the old hard drive in the new computer as a second drive. But, also, installed as a second drive you can also attempt to boot from it. You might be surprised how well Windows 10 adapts to new hardware. But, if it doesn't boot, you still have access to all your data until you are ready to reformat the second drive as a complete data drive. And yes, I have done it many times.

NavyLCDR said:

Install the old hard drive in the new computer as a second drive. But, also, installed as a second drive you can also attempt to boot from it. You might be surprised how well Windows 10 adapts to new hardware. But, if it doesn't boot, you still have access to all your data until you are ready to reformat the second drive as a complete data drive. And yes, I have done it many times.

Ok, so you didn't mean make the old drive the new boot drive. I've heard people have successfully done that and wasn't clear on if that's what you were suggesting.

Thanks for your reply

steve108 said:

...make the old drive the new boot drive. I've heard people have successfully...

I am one of them, Windows 10 is pretty good at sorting out new drivers when it unexpectedly find itself running on completely different hardware.

I have an old laptop running Win7 Home. I wanted to find out if it had ever been upgraded to Win10 in the past and now had a digital license. There's no easy query to do that, the only way to find out is to run Win10 on it and see if it activates from an existing digital license.

To save time, rather than do a clean install I swapped in an HDD from another machine that already had W10 Home installed and activated. On first boot it said 'Windows is installing drivers' and when done it rebooted. On the second boot it went into a fully working Windows. Checking in Settings confirmed that it could not activate as no existing digital license could be found for this machine's hardware ID.

It was only afterwards that I stopped to think how well Windows had coped with the hardware change. The machine that the HDD had come from and on which I had done the clean install had an Intel processor, but the machine I was now running it on has an AMD cpu.