Can I move SSD w/ OS and HDD w/ programs to new computer without problems?

[Rektum]

I have an SSD with Windows 10 and a few programs on it and a HDD with most of my other programs/data on it. I am going to get a new computer soon and was wondering if i could just plug the SSD and HDD into the new computer with no problems. Or would there be problems with windows not being able to find the programs on the HDD or something?

[Rune]

Depending on what version of Windows 10 you have, you will probably need to reactivate it. Other than that, no. Everything should be fine.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Windows usually ties itself to the motherboard. I've done this process from 7 to 10 without problems.

[Rektum]

4 minutes ago, Rune said:

Depending on what version of Windows 10 you have, you will probably need to reactivate it. Other than that, no. Everything should be fine.

 

I'm using the newest version of Windows 10 Home.

 

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Windows usually ties itself to the motherboard. I've done this process from 7 to 10 without problems.

 

Well I've googled this question and lots of other forums are telling me that if I'm switching over to a new motherboard, there will probably be problems with the windows files or whatever, so I'm just confused that I'm being told two different things.

[Rune]

With the new motherboard you'll need to reactivate windows, and possibly reinstall a few drivers for things like LAN/etc.

[Nord]

If you upgraded a previous windows version to windows 10 using the free update switching your hardware will invalidate your key and you'll have to call microsoft support & hope that they re-validate your key for the new activiation. Basically you can just tell them your old PC broke and usualy they will do it.

 

However moving a system drive from PC 1 to PC 2 is not ideal but depending on how you use your PC thats going to be more or less relevant for you..

 

If you are only using it for facebook, youtube and office work, you will most likely do fine with swapping the Drives & just re-installing drivers for the new system.

I've done that several times at work with cloning the old system onto the new PCs HDD, which is basically just like exchanging them and after updating the drivers on the new PC in 8 out of 10 cases I would not get any "this does not work"-reports from the employees. The problem is once issues start to pop up, things get really tricky, because now you'll also have to consider the basically "beaten up" windows installation itself as an possible cause of the issues, most of the times we dont really bother fixing stuff at this point and go straight to clean reformat and give back the old PC's meanwhile.

 

However personaly and from the standpoint of an advanced user, I would always reformat if an OS is changing computers.

Which means if you play games, do video editing and stuff like this that is more stressing to a PC than a browser and flasplayer, you should definatly do a clean OS re-install.

You can basically just copy/paste all of your desktop shortcuts into a folder on your secondary drive & do the same with the shortcuts on the start menu, so you know what you have installed & where you have it installed to. Also backup "C:\Users\YourUsername" and dont forget to backup your savefiles for your computer games - those are usualy in Users/Username, but not all game store them there.

 

After that you'll reformat the system drive aka your SSD, do a fresh OS install on it, install all the drivers etc. and once you are done with that just plug in your HDD & copy over all the stuff you backed up on the drive from your previous OS installation.

Usualy most applications dont have an issue if you do re-installs like this, as they just re-write the registry entry needed and move on.

Obviously you got to re-install all the programs on your SSD and re-configureate windows10. Possibly some user-settings will get lost on some programs and perhaps a few need to be re-instaled, but as said, generally this works just fine and wont take you longer than 2 hours time effort to do.

 

[ExozeGD]

11 hours ago, Rektum said:

 

I'm using the newest version of Windows 10 Home.

 

 

Well I've googled this question and lots of other forums are telling me that if I'm switching over to a new motherboard, there will probably be problems with the windows files or whatever, so I'm just confused that I'm being told two different things.

if you don't know then try, the worst thing that will happen is that you would have to reinstall your windows, just back everything up on your hdd first then try switch the ssd