Windows 10: Swap drive with Windows 10

Hi,

I had a laptop that was upgraded to Windows 10 on SSD drive. Since i have bought another Laptop that came with normal drive. I have Windows 10 installed on new laptop.

I want to swap SSD from old laptop to new laptop. Is it matter of just replacing the hardrives?

If I do swap the drive it will have Windows that was activated on older laptop. I have product stickers on both laptop however both were upgraded from windows 7 Home Edition.

Please suggest best way of doing this?

:)

 

Windows 10 100% disk usages

Actually fixed it. The solution was to swap disks. So disk 1 was swapped for disk 3 and the problem disappeared.

My best guess is that the swap forced windows 10 to reinstall drives for the disk

 

swapping hard drive between 2 computer

Hi all,

i have 2 laptop i running windows 10 pro - laptop 1: running the 32bit, has 960gb ssd drive - main comp, laptop 2 running windows 7 ultimate 64 bits, has 250gb ssd, want to do the swap ssd drive so that the larger ssd drive can be use in laptop2, because
i want the use the larger ssd drive in the newer latptop (laptop 2) and also want to keep all the programs i have on there without having to go through all the installation and reconfigure everything again.i thought i could just swap the ssd drive between
to 2 com (because laptop has better hardware and specs than laptop 1) ,

while laptop 2 startup and run fine after the swapping to the larger ssd drive but i got message saying i need to activate windows 10 pro. swapping the drives back and both laptops works fine with their own drive and windows version.

my question is if i am to also upgrade laptop 2 to windows 10 pro, can i just simply swapping the hard drive with laptop or would the system still ask me to activate windows 10 pro again???

if swapping the drive between the laptops won't work at all then what is the best method to get achieve what i want without have to copy all docs/files i need from 960gb ssd drive to an external drive then do a fresh windows installation on the 960 while
it is in the laptop 2 then transfer the files from external drive to it a again?

please help

thanks

 

First thoughts, the new laptop came with media for recovery or do you know of a recovery partition on it ? Putting that SSD on it with an activated Windows 10 from another older laptop may not work, for one different system drivers on that SSD then the new one and activation process from Microsoft due to knowing which system. I would regularly in this case reformat and install Windows 10 again on it, but this new laptops OS could be been an OEM of Windows 10, so if download another copy of Windows 10 i am not sure then even though you have the product key.

Think most would say clone the HDD from the newer laptop drive to the new SSD, not familiar with the process but they are software to do this. Similar to this here Macrium Reflect http://www.howtogeek.com/199068/how-...under-an-hour/

 

Take the SSD out of the old laptop and put it in the new laptop. You might have to do two things - you might have to change the product key to match that on the new laptop, and you might have to install any drivers for the new laptop that Windows 10 does not include natively.

You can export drivers from the new laptop before the switch by running from an administrator command prompt:

dism /online /export-driver /destination:e:\DriversW10

The path in red will be to a storage location that you set up to hold the drivers.

And if things go horribly wrong, then OMG!.... just put the old HDD back in.

 

Old laptop came with recovery partition and Windows 7 was pre installed. I have upgraded to windows 10. On new laptop it has come Win 7 also which has been upgraded also to windows 10. Both windows 10 are activated.

 

Yeah that would be an ideal by replacing SSD to new laptop. Can i still use Windows 7 sticker that is on the laptop to activate Windows 10 by changing product code?

Yeah i would need to update the drivers etc.

He he *Smile If everything fails I shall put old drive back in. You scared me here *Smile

 

Since the new laptop has already had a Windows 7 to 10 upgrade done on it, the Windows 10 Will stay activated as long as it is the same version, Home or Pro.

 

Does it not matter that SSD had Windows 10 upgraded from win 7 using different key?

 

No. Digital entitlement is saved and retrieved by the unique hardware ID that the product key has no affect on.

 

Here i was not sure this new laptop came with Windows 10 or not, so having Windows 7 and upgraded to Windows 10 makes things a bit easier.

 

Correct. That is what I thought originally too. And I've done almost exactly the same thing the OP is talking about. I built myself a new computer. Both my father-in-law's and my old computer were upgrades to Windows 10 from Windows 7 with digital entitlements. When I built my new computer, I installed the hard drive from my father-in-law's computer into my old one (which was an upgrade for him). Since both my old computer and his old computer both had digital entitlements, his Windows 10 stayed activated by retrieving the digital entitlement which was on Microsoft activation servers for my old computer.

 

Yep, changing hard drives should be no issue since both were upgraded, same as for the thread starter. I just learned here from a post that even changing a CPU and Motherboard along with a HDD on a PC upgraded to Windows 10 had no issues being activated, that i always wondered if possible being more major components.

 

I changed the drive and laptop booted fine. However i completely forgot when I upgraded Win 7 to windows 10 it was Windows 10 insider preview 10240 and later it was upgraded to Windows 10 when it came out. Windows 10 was upgraded to pro version instead of home. I kept it like that since. When SSD drive was inserted which Win 10 pro it showed Window 10 is not activated.

After reading many guides and forum on the net I was unable to downgrade to Win 10 pro to home.

I even changed product name and id using regedit and then ran media creation tool to install home version over pro for some reason that failed.

Finally decided to use Microsoft live chat, after explaining the issue, they suggested that they will install the correct version as a fresh install. I insisted keeping all files and programs etc. Microsoft ran some slmgr commands via cmd etc. They were about to install fresh copy but tried Windows 10 pro defualt key and it activated. Support guy was confused but happy that Win 10 pro was activated with reinstalling lol.

Somehow from insider preview i was upgraded to pro instead of home edition.

I still wanted to know the key of pro version and microsoft support guy came to this forum to download showkeyplus *Smile it shows the activated key.

I am glad its sorted but i am still confused that they used the standard key for pro, is that the key i need to use in the future to fresh install Windows 10 pro again?