is windows 7 cloneable?

asiancorruption · October 7, 2015

so i have an old seagate barracuda 160gb that was last used in a win7 computer. If i clone the drive to my new drive in my build, will win7 work in my new build?

techguru · October 7, 2015

so i have an old seagate barracuda 160gb that was last used in a win7 computer. If i clone the drive to my new drive in my build, will win7 work in my new build?

no

its differnt hardware

gotta do a clean install

vanished · October 7, 2015

so i have an old seagate barracuda 160gb that was last used in a win7 computer. If i clone the drive to my new drive in my build, will win7 work in my new build?

I would think probably not. You will likely have licensing issues, driver issues, and who knows what else for problems to name a few.

royalcrown · October 7, 2015

1. you'll have to reactivate it.

If it's OEM you are not legally entitled to transfer it to another system AT ALL (even if that one catches on fire and turns to a pool of molten slag). If it is ANY sort of retail you are allowed to transfer it provided it is only on one physical computer.

2 There are 2 ways it will work because I have done both:

a. Acronis True image has a feature that lets you install it on different hardware (different as in different chipset, cpu, etc). Acronis Migrate Easy used to be a seperate product then rolled into the True Image as the "Bare Metal Install" feature. Used to be an add on for Trueimage, now rolled into the more expensive packages.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/

b. the 2nd way that almost always works is to uninstall ALL windows drivers from device manager in safe mode then shut down and reinstall the drive in the new hardware. Do not remove them by checking the delete driver box !

When windows boots up it will redetect the hardware and reinstall the device drivers provided you uninstalled them and did not check the delete box during uninstall.

This way takes a long time and it can seem like the computer is frozen, just keep waiting about 20 - 30 min or so if it does because some things take about 10 mins. It will also require you have driver cd's for your new hardware (especially if it's a lot newer).

Also it won't work if you installed in IDE mode on the old computer and want to run your SATA ports in AHCI or RAID modes. You'd need to Run them in IDE.

If your "old" computer had windows installed with AHCI mode or is running it now, the new one WILL work in AHCI mode as well.

I have migrated to much newer hardware just using the uninstall drivers method and it works MOST of the time. Since there are so many variables, no guarantee however

Hope this helps