Windows 10: Can I swap hard drives between laptops without damaging my existing W10 installation?

So my laptop (HP Notebook 15-r210ne, runs Windows 10 Insider Fast Ring) has pretty much gone kaput. A GPU problem has rendered video output of any kind near useless. With that in mind, I'm planning on sourcing another laptop (either an Acer or a Dell, both of which come with 500GB hard drives) and swapping this one's 1TB hard drive and 8GB RAM into the new one.

Questions:

1. Is there a way to do this so I can keep my data without having to resort to an external drive?
2. Will I need to reinstall Windows 10 from a clean boot, and will that work if I create a boot drive from my existing OEM install?

submitted by /u/destructdisc
[link] [comments]

:)

 

swapping laptop hard drives

I have a windows 10 laptop, its a hp 15 notebook pc, my mom has an older hp pavillion laptop, not sure on model number but its running windows 7, Im wondering if it is possible to swap hard drives and have both laptops run fine. If not what do I need to
do in order to make the swap work?

 

Laptop hard drive upgrade

To replace a hard drive on a laptop is a little more troublesome than a desktop. 1st as most people here suggest you will need some sort of a backup disk just in case. Also be sure when buying the new Hard Disk is compatible with your model. And i would strongly suggest you install a new system and start from scratch because there are far too many problems that can occur when transferring system files.

 

Swapping Hard Drives from Laptop 10 to Windows 7 Laptop

All machines built for Windows 8 and above and supplied by the OEM with Windows pre-installed will have a full Windows key embedded in the firmware. This is only read and used by Setup when doing a clean install. Activation of this 'swapped in' W10 disk would not look for this key in the firmware, rather it would require the PC to already have a digital license for W10 stored on the Microsoft activation servers.


For Windows 7 machines there was an SLP marker embedded in the bios which was not a key. It was just a marker which, together with the generic OEM key in the OEM W7 image, would activate the pre-installed OEM W7 without needing to contact the activation servers.


For W10 to activate on this old W7 PC the PC would already have to have a digital license for W10. It could gain one by upgrading its existing activated W7 to W10. Note that a digital license is only for one edition of W10, Home or Pro. Which license it gets on upgrade depends on which edition of W7 it had.

If the disk to be 'swapped in' is W10 Pro, but the PC only has a digital license for Home, then it will not activate.

If the 'swapped in' disk is W10 Home and the PC's digital license is for W10 Pro that may not activate either, but the installed W10 Home could be upgraded to Pro by entering the generic Pro key, then it would activate.


The main problem in getting the 'transplant patient' to boot would be if the donor machine was UEFI with a gpt disk, but the old W7 PC was a Legacy bios machine that only supports booting from an mbr disk.