windows moving Moving windows to a M2 without losing files on other disks

[LittleCaesar]

Goodmorning, good midday and good evening

Its soon Christmas which means new upgrades and more toys for the pc 

 

BG info

Currently running

• 1 x 250GB SSD, split in 2, 110GB for Windows OS & 120GB for games
• 1 x 1TB regular HDD, split in 2, 350GB for games & 650GB (mostly unused) for other programs and junk

Im going to "upgrade", pretty much build a new pc with this, since everything else on my machine is of age

• 1x INTEL CORE I7 8700K / 3.7 GHZ COFFEE LAKE PROCESSOR
• 1x ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-H GAMING (or similar)
• 2X8GB - DDR4 - 2400MHZ (brand not yet selected but have been suggested CORSAIR VENGEANCE LPX)
• 1x new PSU, not found one suitable yet
• 1x ASUS GTX 1080 TI
• 1x M2

My problem now comes with windows.

As I would like to keep all my games, programs and so on, without having to reinstall (which is impossible since I dont have disk or keys for many of them) all of it, I'm curious if it is possible to extract windows from my SSD, and move it onto the M2 chip without losing the "connections" between OS and the rest of everything. As Windows use paths in the registry to know where everything is, I'm worried that these are getting severed If its being moved.

Is it possible to move Windows without this happen?

I know I can clone it onto a new disk, or chip in this case, but as far as I know, windows would still expect everything to be in the same places.

 

I hope there is some windows expert out there that can help make me a little bit smarter about this

May you all have a good day  

[3rrant]

4 minutes ago, LittleCaesar said:

cut

You can clone the SSD into the new one, and you should be fine. But NVMe based drives can give a headache by themself and windows do not really always like to be "throw around". You cannot copy paste, cloning is the only option.

[LittleCaesar]

5 minutes ago, ErrantNyles said:

You can clone the SSD into the new one, and you should be fine. But NVMe based drives can give a headache by themself and windows do not really always like to be "throw around". You cannot copy paste, cloning is the only option.

I was afraid people were going to tell me that

I had thought about bite the *ick and reinstall everythign, but Im one of the many people who got Windows 10 for free, and I'm (beside very far from an Windows expert) a bit afraid that if I try to freshly install windows on the M2, that then I'll have to buy a new W10 key. 

[3rrant]

37 minutes ago, LittleCaesar said:

I was afraid people were going to tell me that

I had thought about bite the *ick and reinstall everythign, but Im one of the many people who got Windows 10 for free, and I'm (beside very far from an Windows expert) a bit afraid that if I try to freshly install windows on the M2, that then I'll have to buy a new W10 key. 

If don't change the motherboard, you don't need a new license (Which btw you can find for 10$ as ESD digital format basically anywhere, and they are legit).

 

If you license is linked to a outlook or hotmail or microsoft account (you are logged into the computer with this account) you can reinstall the OS on a different drive, during the setup click "I don't own a key" when prompted. At the end of the setup it will ask you to log in, use the same account.

 

When finished, go to settings > activation and it should be active by itself. To be even more secure, go to this activation page BEFORE reinstalling and take notes of you support codes so that if something goes wrong you can call Microsoft support and follow the audio instructions to restore you key.

[LittleCaesar]

24 minutes ago, ErrantNyles said:

If don't change the motherboard, you don't need a new license (Which btw you can find for 10$ as ESD digital format basically anywhere, and they are legit).

 

If you license is linked to a outlook or hotmail or microsoft account (you are logged into the computer with this account) you can reinstall the OS on a different drive, during the setup click "I don't own a key" when prompted. At the end of the setup it will ask you to log in, use the same account.

 

When finished, go to settings > activation and it should be active by itself. To be even more secure, go to this activation page BEFORE reinstalling and take notes of you support codes so that if something goes wrong you can call Microsoft support and follow the audio instructions to restore you key.

I have to change MB, im running at 7-2600, best of the line my current board can support, so there isn't much choice

Im explicitly declined to use a online MS account back when I installed this OS, so I dont think the key is connected to a MS account, which makes it all harder to do.