Moving Windows

SpellowHouse · 2 Nov 2024 at 12:19

I have had a copy of Win10 Pro for some years. In that time, it upgraded itself to Win11 pro, and I have moved it to a new motherboard and CPU several times. I don't have a Microsoft account, but as long as I use the original SSD that it's installed on, then moving it is no problem at all. Just pop the SSD in the new motherboard and off it goes.
Thing is, that I have always bought intel, until now. What I am not sure about, is whether the same approach will work if I change the motherboard to AMD?
There are three potential problems, I see, that the massive change in incompatible hardware may cause it to fail to boot to Windows, and or Microsoft may refuse to transfer the registration to such a totally different board. The third problem may well happen if it does fail, which is that I only have Win10 codes, so if I installed from scratch, will I be able to upgrade to 11 for free?
I mean, what I don't want here is a new PC with no way to get it working on the day.

andy_mk3 · 2 Nov 2024 at 12:25

99% of the time it'll work absolutely fine. Only two weeks ago I booted my 5800x3d system on an SSD out of a 2nd gen i5 laptop to test something, and it booted without an issue at all.

W10 keys will work with W11.

SpellowHouse · 2 Nov 2024 at 12:28

andy_mk3 said:
99% of the time it'll work absolutely fine. Only two weeks ago I booted my 5800x3d system on an SSD out of a 2nd gen i5 laptop to test something, and it booted without an issue at all.

W10 keys will work with W11.

OK so that givers me two options. I can try moving the SSD and if that fails then I will have the Win 11 flash ready! Thanks!

andy_mk3 · 2 Nov 2024 at 12:32

Only issue I've come across myself in the past is booting an Intel system with Ryzen Master installed and was causing a BSOD on boot. But otherwise it's always worked just fine.

Donnie Fisher · 2 Nov 2024 at 15:09

It should likely boot into the OS fine and get up and running. In fairness to windows, its quite resilient on boot when it finds alternative hardware installed. It generally tries to just get on with things by looking for drivers in the background and installing them behind the scenes.

There is the potential that would flag up as unactivated due to the large hardware change, but my experience has been that's rare ... I think if you're transferring over a Microsoft account to the new hardware, its quite happy.

j.col · 2 Nov 2024 at 16:28

I moved from intel to amd a couple of years ago. I just fitted my old intel ssd into the new pc (amd) and it booted first time.
I did download some of the motherboard drivers but that was it.
I was planning on doing a fresh install but tbh in the 2 years, it's been working flawlessly.

bobuk · 4 Nov 2024 at 10:27

Donnie Fisher said:
It should likely boot into the OS fine and get up and running. In fairness to windows, its quite resilient on boot when it finds alternative hardware installed. It generally tries to just get on with things by looking for drivers in the background and installing them behind the scenes.

There is the potential that would flag up as unactivated due to the large hardware change, but my experience has been that's rare ... I think if you're transferring over a Microsoft account to the new hardware, its quite happy.

unfortunately when I went from Intel to AMD, I installed windows 11 on a new M2Mvm drive and it didn't activate.