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A few questions - Win10 migrating to new system and HDD cloning
Hi all...this will be a bit of a novel, so I apologize.
I have done clones and migrations with Windows 7 in the past, but never with Win10, so I was looking for some info and pointers.
Now, I know licensing works differently with Win10 and am worried for my brother's computer. A little background...in the last year, it has started restarting at random times, and after it does this random restart for the first time in awhile, it will continue constantly restarting (usually just after POST within a few minutes before Winboot so you can never get anywhere) until you stop and let it 'rest' overnight for many hours, then it will be randomly fine again for awhile. We thought it was a PSU issue and replaced that with a new one and all was well for a month and a half until last night when the issue returned (we had also upgraded his video card at this time, so we know it's not that). I took all the RAM out (4 sticks, 2gb each) and tried them one at a time in various RAM slots and the restarting issue persisted with every stick, so unless all the RAM is somehow bad, I don't think it's the RAM...seems mobo related.
Now, in case he has to get a new motherboard, CPU and RAM (he can reuse everything else), I was curious how I could go about migrating his current Win10 install to the new hardware. I know Win10 is linked to the hardware in your system and he has a Win7-install-upgraded version of Win10 Home 64-bit from the whole "Free Windows 10 Upgrade Period" thing. His current main OS drive is an ancient Seagate 120gb IDE drive, which I want to upgrade to a 100% working 320gb SATA drive I have sitting around.
If it were Win7, I would usually Sysprep it, clone it to the new drive, plug that into the new hardware, install drivers and license key and be done with it. However......does Win10 have a Sysprep function? Is it possible to clone it to a new drive....? With no license key and an 'free-upgraded copy of Win10, can I install it on new hardware and still get it to activate?
Thanks for any help and suggestions! :)