Windows 10: Cloning an installation to a different machine after upgrading

I have a few laptops, all of them are the same specs except for a few with a different GPU. All of them run the exact same software. I'm planning to upgrade them all manually to 10 first to register the machine, then create an image so in case a drive goes belly up, I'll just restore it from the image created instead of installing all the software one by one. I'm going to take one machine, sysprep it then keep a copy of that image for restoring on to the other machines.

In this case would it just reactivate properly on the newly cloned machine?

:)

 

Cloning problems with Samsung SSD 850 EVO

Unable to clone a Samsung SSD 850 EVO on a newly upgraded Win10 machine. Samsung's cloning app does not see the drive, though Samsung's Magician software does (albeit grayed out).

Formatted and mounted the drive in MS Disk Management; drive appears as E.

(Already successfully cloned and installed an 850 on a different machine using Win8.1; then successfully upgraded to Win10, so I know what success looks like.)

TIA,

Sam

 

Get Win 10 activation but keep using Win 7 for a while

Hi there,

i have a question regarding the activation process.

In our company we still have ~ 30 machines running Win 7. In the last weeks i made several upgrades but sometimes the upgrade was a total mess and people couldn't work for a day.

Even if i would just upgrade 1 machine a day, i wouldn't match the 29th deadline with all machines.

So my idea was, that i use another ssd, clone the Win 7 system, use this clone to make the upgrade (key getting activated for win 10) then remove the clone and keep the machine run Win 7 for a while, so i can make the upgrades machine by machine even after
the end of the month but already have all keys activated for Win 10.

I'm not talking about simultaneous use !

Thanks in advance

Kind regards

Max

 

Hi there

SYSPREP should work - but you still will need a licence (or Free upgrade) for each machine you install W10 on. If you have a VL (Volume licence) -- no problems - but you aren't allowed to clone several machines from just ONE Windows Licence unless it's a VL or multiple activation version.

If the old machines had valid Windows licences then activation should in theory work on the machines -- just try it on a second machine and see before you SYSPREP the rest of them. Observe the legal requirements though.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Keep us updated. I'd guess yes, too, but I'd like to know how it turns out.

(I'm assuming that each upgrade installed correctly with it's previous
version of Windows activating the upgrade to Windows 10, right?)

 

All the machines have OEM 7 Pro, which I will first manually do an 10 Pro upgrade to get Microsoft to save the hardware hash, hence all of them will be on a clean genuine 10 Pro. My question is if one drive gives, can I just take an image from one of them and let it re-activate, or will there be hardware hash clashes. I just don't want to go through the pain of rebuilding it from scratch one by one.

 

I think it would detect that the hardware hash was different and try to reactivate which should pass since the current hardware hash on that machine would have already been activated. I don't think there would be an issue.

If there was an issue you could simply force reactivation once you'd overwritten the current installation with your image at command prompt:
slmgr /ato

 

The slmgr.vbs -ato trick worked. I further tweaked the process by generating the GenuineTicket.xml, on a barebones WIndows 7 SLP install (the machines all have a 7 COA), then after cloning, did the manual activation. Works brilliantly, now I don't even have to go through installing 7 and 10 multiple times.

And I would assume in future upgrades I can skip dropping the XML, since it's already activated once with Microsoft as a 7 upgrade.