Possibly stupid windows 10 question (moving from one activated machine to another)

[Werewolf]

Right, silly question time.

I have two motherboards here, both windows 10 activated.


Machine 1 (lets call it Alpha) had Windows 10 pro (activated from a Windows 8 pro install).

Machine 2 (Beta) has Windows 10 normal (activated from Win 7 home, then reinstalled as clean Win 10 install).


What I want to do is move the HDD from Beta which was a temporary system whilst Alpha was being RMA'd, to Alpha

Will the Windows install from Beta detect it's now in Alpha and activate for Pro?

Beta then gets a clean install of Windows 10 Home.

The reason is Beta was only intended as a short term system for me, but if I can move the drive over it'll save me hours of mucking around (simply exporting/importing my emails takes about 2-3 hours each way).

 

[Werewolf]

And possibly stupid question seems to be answered

Despite Windows 10 pro being activated on Alpha, moving Beta's drive over just reported "not activated".

I would have hoped as it was going by a hardware key it would have checked the new config with the servers and found the match.

Oh, and copying tens of thousands of emails to an SSD is very fast, as in minutes vs hours to a normal drive.

I think I'm going to keep a few gig spare on a fast SSD for email backup in future.