Windows 10: Transferring installation from old laptop to new laptop.

I wanted to transfer OS from old laptop to new laptop in a virtual hard drive dual booting. The reason to do this is that I had some old legacy programs that I still use but would be unable to reinstall as no longer available. Old laptop was AMD 10. New one I7 with optane SSD. I tried simply restoring a Macrium Reflect image and it failed as it did not have optane ssd drivers. So I created a custom install.wim (@Kari tutorials were valuable) of existing installation, then injected optane drivers. I then used dism to install OS to vhd (using custom install.wim) and this time it booted but OS was missing virtually every key driver. I started to laboriously update each one manually, then I realised my new laptop had all the drivers in the base OS installation (laptop came with w10). So I exported all the base os drivers and injected into my custom.wim file and reinstalled to new VHDX file, recreated boot entry and Boom - it booted perfectly with all key drivers in place. Windows update then kicked in updating a couple of the drivers. So sequence that worked for me 1) install W10 on new pc (from its oobe) 2) export drivers 3) create custom install.wim and inject all drivers (also inject optane drivers into boot.wim) 4) install customised install.wim into new vhd. 5) create boot entry. Obvious in hindsight!

:)

 

What to do with old laptop

If you actually read the thread it is a spare old laptop.

 

Transfer old laptop to new

Can someone please let me know how to transfer as much as possible from my old Windows 10 laptop to a new one.

 

how to transfer files and apps from old laptop to new laptop

what is the best way to transfer files and apps from old laptop to new laptop? Both have Windows 10 installed