Windows 10: Hello, installing win10 on an laptop with no OS, can I or should I delete the uefi and...

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How to clone Win10 (UEFI) installation to non-UEFI laptop?

Hello.

I have my work laptop (main) with Windows 10 installation (UEFI, GPT) where all apps already installed and configured. Recently I was given an old notebook (secondary) with Windows 8.1 installation (legacy BIOS, non-UEFI, MBR).

Is there more or less simple way to clone Windows 10 OS from my work laptop to this legacy notebook? I'd like to have BIOS notebook on standby in another location having the same OS and apps installed, and be able to restore to secondary notebook from system backups that I do for my main laptop.

My original intention was to use Acronis Universal Restore (because I'm using ATI for backups and restores) or AOMEI's software, but then I realized that I'm backing up UEFI installation with GPT, while secondary notebook is BIOS with MBR. So my guess is that this scenario complicates things to some degree. But is it still doable?

 

Accidental deletion of UEFI partition

On my uefi bios there is an option to set it to load the bios configuration in legacy or uefi.

This also lets me choose how hardware is loaded and if both uefi, legacy or both load and the order.

What your issue here could be that the win7 disk is loading in the format that looks for the uefi partition on the hard drive because it was a uefi bios on win7.

Now this may not be true because win8 was the first native os that supported uefi bios, even though win7 could be installed on uefi bios under 2tb hard drives the drive format had to be mbr.

Another thing to look into is if your bios has a boot save order option that it is reverting back to even though you set the devices in a different order.

There is a program called disk part, it is a small iso base on linux that can check drive partition and status.,it can be run from the cd with no installation needed.

Being that the hard drive partition was deleted but attempted to be fixed could have caused more

effects because now the underlying data may have been recovered with 3rd party tools.

What is the size of the hard drive ?

Not being able to load the win7 disk or win10 disk sounds more like a corrupted bios or bios configuration.

Win10 has a habit of reporting incorrect information to the bios.

Pull the win10 backup hard drive and try to boot the pc with win7 or win10 disk.

What this would confirm is if it is something besides the win10 installton.

Being that there is an image of win10 and the other steps do not work; connect the drive with the backup on it, try to boot from the win7 or 10 dvd disk and run the restore from there.

Would be a good option to copy that backup first to another drive before hand.

The only other option is to delete all partitions on the win10 drive using another pc or gparted and start fresh.

On the drive connecting and disappearing, that could be a power management setting that the pc time out is set too low.

 

Accidental deletion of UEFI partition

Again, thank you for your helpful suggestions. I am going to wait a bit to absorb all this information before going on to the next step, which will be to do the upgrade as you suggest.