Moving a windows 10 home drive from one PC to another

vexorg · 11 Jan 2022

It's been a while since I upgraded a full PC for someone, but their hardware is getting on and old.

I have a much newer bare PC, newer motherboard, better processor, more memory.
Can windows 10 home cope with new hardware.

I know older OS's (NT and 2000) could cope with motherboard changes, used to come up with the old "detecting new hardware" and "installing new hardware" in the good old days.
Home version is pretty rubbishy, but would it cope with a new system hardware?

Even in safe mode and somehow tell it to refresh the hardware.
There's so much junk on the old hard drive that they would rather live with painfully slow than re-install it all.

Ztruker · 11 Jan 2022

The first thing to do is backup the current install. The best way to do this is to use Macrium Reflect Free to make an image backup to an external hard drive. If you don't have an external hard drive now is a good time to get one as regular backup should be a part of your normal process. You can get a 1TB external hard drive for $60 (less if on sale).

There are other backup programs available but Macrium is the one I use and recommend.

Acronis True Image. A full featured backup solution. ...
EaseUS ToDo Backup. A flexible solution in the backup arena. ...
Paragon Backup & Recovery. Enterprise options for home backup. ...
NovaBackup. Does the basics well, but only the basics.

This is something you should be donw on a regular basis as part of normal system maintenance anyway.

Once you have that, try the drive in the new system. It may work as Win 10 is pretty good at handling new hardware.
I would disconnect any additional hardware, leaving just the display, mouse and keyboard.

If it goes badly you can restore the drive from the image backup.

spunk · 11 Jan 2022

In the XP, and Windows 7 days, if you put a drive that had Windows installed on it from a different computer with different Chipset, the computer wouldn't boot.
But Windows 10 is a lot more forgiving and it will recognize the new Chipset and install drivers for it on First Bootup. So, it may take it a little longer to boot on the first time.
After booting, press the Windows key+X and choose Device Manager and see if there are any devices that need drivers. Then do all the Windows Update, if that doesn't install all the drivers you need, you can go to the Computer or Motherboard manufacturers download site and download the drivers you need from the Device Manager.

Windows 10 Home and Pro are the same OS, dependent on what Product key you type in to unlock the components of Pro. Pro has more bells and whistles for use with computers in a Work environment with a little more control given to the User. So, Home is no more Rubbishy then Pro.