Windows 10: I cloned my OEM Win10 C Drive and it is running my new PC, but it needs reactivating. Can I...

My laptop came with OEM Win7 and was upgraded free to Win10. Recently the laptop was having some major issues so I built myself a new Desktop PC with all modern, brand new parts Z790 MB, 14th gen Intel CPU, Nvidia 4070 GPU etc. I cloned the laptops C drive and put it into the new PC and after a few driver updates and adjustments, it is up and running, without a problem. Windows just needs to be reactivated which I understand will not happen since the OEM Win10 is single license.My hope is to buy a Retail Win11 and without doing a complete reinstall of everything, upgrade to the Retail Win11?

:)

 

Cloning Drive C:/

I bought a new hard drive so I could clone my main hard drive. The new drive was formatted after putting into an external hard drive bay connected using USB cable. I right clicked on my C:/ drive & chose copy. I then right clicked on my new hard drive F:/
and chose paste. It then started to copy C:/ to F:/, but it eventually failed saying I wasn't authorized to access certain files even though I'm the Administrator of my computer. It also said I had a bad sector on C:/ drive. I then reformatted C:/ & tried
to make a clone drive onto F:/. All that did was copy over ...

$RECYCLEBIN, Boot, Recovery, System Volume 1, bootmgr, BOOTNXT, BOOTSECT.BAK

It appears to me that all it did was make a boot disk in case C:/ drive failed to boot I could have the computer boot using drive F:/ which is not what I wanted. I already have drive E:/ for that in the same bay housing as F:/.

What I want is an exact clone of C:/ drive, every program & file on it!

Anyone got any suggestions?

 

After adding a new larger HD and cloning drive C, how do I rename the new drive to "C" with the older drive C still installed in the Desktop PC?

Hi Dave. I have not changed the boot order yet, when I turned on the PC this morning after the cloning was completed, the PC opened into setup BIOS screen. It listed both drives, the old listed as drive C and the new one as drive E. It asked me which drive to boot to, I kept it at the old one for now until I felt I had a better understanding of this works without causing issues.

I have not formatted the old drive yet to wipe it clean.

 

Win10 Boot Problem on cloned SSD drive

I have a DIY desktop that I built in 2013 and installed (as I remember) win8. It has been automatically updating since then. It now has the latest version of Win10. I still runs well.

My problem is that the win10 C: SSD drive is too small (256GB). I purchased a larger 1TB SSD. I have successfully (without error messages) cloned all the files to the new 1TB drive. My old drive still boots.

When I enter BIOS and try to boot the new 1TB drive, I get a message saying BCD???? boot error is missing. In Disk Manager it is indicated that the new 1TB drive does not have the required BCD boot code installed. The old 256GB drive does.

I have searched and tried many ways to redo, reconfigure, etc. with no success.

Can anyone please provide references and/or input to correctly clone the new 1TB drive. I hope the answer is not that is required to re-install win10 and my many apps.

Thank you.

Jim Gunn