Windows 10: Swapping HDD with Win10 to a new computer

My situation is this: My samsung laptop died on me before I could back much of my HDD up. I have the opportunity to buy a nearly identical Samsung from Ebay that does not have an HDD for equal or less than the cost of fixing my current laptop (Ac plug shorted)

My question: if I install my current HDD with Win10 installed into this other, nearly identical Samsung, will it boot? The original Samsung came with 8, and I took the free upgrade to 10.

:)

 

HDD to SSD Swap with Win10

You can do the clean install, and you don't need your Windows 8 product key.

When you upgraded to Windows 10 it stored a "fingerprint" of your computer on the Microsoft servers.

You can in fact install, skipping the prompts for the product key, and when you get to the point where you log in Windows 10 will automatically activate based on finding the "fingerprint" on the Microsoft servers.

This all works because the hard drive is not used to determine what the "fingerprint" is.

Now if you were doing something like changing out your motherboard that would be a different story.

But with that said you might want to wait for the Threshold 2 update to come out.

It is rumored to be coming out early in November, and to have changes to the media creation program and licensing. If the rumors are correct it will get the changes that are currently being tested in the Insider builds.

What they have done is changed it, so that unlike before, you should be able to activate using your Windows 8 product key (currently you can't active with a old Windows key, it has to be done with the fingerprint approach or a new Windows 10 product key).

 

HDD to SSD Swap with Win10

Hello Community,

I have Win10 on my current PC with a HDD. I bough the laptop when Win 8 was the latest and not so greatest. I've upgraded to 8.1 and recently Win10. I would eventually like to speed things up by installing a SSD and taking out the old HDD. Then do a fresh
install of Win 10 with an installation CD created by the getwin10 app. I have everything backed up and prepared for the switch but, I do not want to install 8 then 8.1 then 10. My question is: Can I use my Win 8 product key to activate a Win 10 OS? I've talked
to several IT people and they are unsure of the outcome. This is my only working PC as of now and I'm a bit nervous of losing it. Is there anything else that should be brought to my attention as well?

Thank you,

Beef

 

Here's what I'd probably do first:
Run some tests on your HDD with it plugged in as an external disk on another PC.

E.g. Hard Disk Sentinel (trial), and chkdsk (they look for different things).

Even with that, some partitions will not have been verified, nor the integrity of your system files (there are some other checks you could do).

That aside, it may well be it will work.

Worst case, you can clean install on the second laptop and rescue some data from your disk.

If it doesn't boot, you can try
- Startup repair (needs a Win 10 boot medium)
- Macrium reflect's Fix Boot utility (needs a MR bootable medium, or Kyhi's bootable disk/DVD from the top of the Software and Apps section)

The way to make it easier to recover from this sort of crisis is to routinely use disk imaging (e.g. Macrium Reflect + external disk for image sets- which may not be what you mean by backing up), starting from when you first get Windows running on a PC.