Transferring installation from old laptop to new laptop.

cereberus · 31 Jul 2021

I wanted to transfer OS from old laptop to new laptop in a virtual hard drive dual booting.

The reason to do this is that I had some old legacy programs that I still use but would be unable to reinstall as no longer available.

Old laptop was AMD 10. New one I7 with optane SSD.

I tried simply restoring a Macrium Reflect image and it failed as it did not have optane ssd drivers.

So I created a custom install.wim (@Kari tutorials were valuable) of existing installation, then injected optane drivers.

I then used dism to install OS to vhd (using custom install.wim) and this time it booted but OS was missing virtually every key driver.

I started to laboriously update each one manually, then I realised my new laptop had all the drivers in the base OS installation (laptop came with w10).

So I exported all the base os drivers and injected into my custom.wim file and reinstalled to new VHDX file, recreated boot entry and Boom - it booted perfectly with all key drivers in place.

Windows update then kicked in updating a couple of the drivers.

So sequence that worked for me

1) install W10 on new pc (from its oobe)

2) export drivers

3) create custom install.wim and inject all drivers (also inject optane drivers into boot.wim)

4) install customised install.wim into new vhd.

5) create boot entry.

Obvious in hindsight!

hsehestedt · 31 Jul 2021

If you didn't want to go through the trouble of injecting the drivers into a custom WIM, you could also do this:

1) Export all the drivers from your system like this:

Code:

pnputil /export-driver * C:\Drivers

2) Save that C:\Drivers to someplace else such as a thumb drive

3) Install Windows as you would normally.

4) Connect the drive with the drivers, open an elevated command prompt and change to that drive.

5) Run this command:

Code:

pnputil /add-driver *.inf /subdirs /install

This will install all of the original drivers.

6) Reboot

NOTE: For any boot-critical drivers, you can still inject those, or you can simply manually load those during installation.