Migrating to a new windows PC.
April 21, 2022 8:45 AM Subscribe
I'm looking for a good guide or set of practices to migrate from a windows 10 homebuilt machine to a windows 11 prebuilt machine by HP, both for continuity of information and to nuke the bloatware on the prebuilt machine from orbit.
My gaming PC has finally tanked after 8 years of faithful service (it appears to be a GPU issue, or possibly a processor issue; it's long overdue for a refresh though). The HD is fine, and intact. I'm I'm replacing it with a prebuilt system given the current GPU availability issues.
Old system is running windows 10, new system is running windows 11 (specifically it is an HP OMEN 25L)
In an ideal world, I'd wipe the prebuilt system and install windows 10, and then migrate my information over...but it's been about...8 years since I last monkeyed with windows or this kind of stuff. My knowledge is outdated, and at least in the past, everytime I've moved this system around new and lovely easy software is out there to aid the process.
Would it be insane or problematic to just drop my old HD into the machine and build the drivers to run everything from that point? Any compelling reasons to migrate things by hand and use windows 11?
Any good step by step guides out there to rig this up?
100% fine voiding warranties; this was more a vehicle to get components easily and economically. Several additions to the existing hardware will take place in short order.
My gaming PC has finally tanked after 8 years of faithful service (it appears to be a GPU issue, or possibly a processor issue; it's long overdue for a refresh though). The HD is fine, and intact. I'm I'm replacing it with a prebuilt system given the current GPU availability issues.
Old system is running windows 10, new system is running windows 11 (specifically it is an HP OMEN 25L)
In an ideal world, I'd wipe the prebuilt system and install windows 10, and then migrate my information over...but it's been about...8 years since I last monkeyed with windows or this kind of stuff. My knowledge is outdated, and at least in the past, everytime I've moved this system around new and lovely easy software is out there to aid the process.
Would it be insane or problematic to just drop my old HD into the machine and build the drivers to run everything from that point? Any compelling reasons to migrate things by hand and use windows 11?
Any good step by step guides out there to rig this up?
100% fine voiding warranties; this was more a vehicle to get components easily and economically. Several additions to the existing hardware will take place in short order.
Best answer: Oh yeah: I'll also run a reliable product key finder on both the old machine and inside the bloatware-addled OEM-provided Windows installation on the new one, so I have backups of the licence keys for all the installed MS software, before starting any of the above.
This has come in handy several times after some kind of weird ACPI fuckery has happened on the target box to mess up licensing in the transplanted installation.
It's also pretty common for Windows to demand re-validation if it finds itself running on hardware that's substantially different to what it booted on last time, and if the original Windows license was one of the OEM/system-builder variants and the new mobo isn't from the same manufacturer as the old one, for that re-validation to fail.
Using slmgr.vbs to reset the installation product key to the one that came with the OEM's bloatware installation will fix this as long as the underlying Windows flavours are compatible.
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
This has come in handy several times after some kind of weird ACPI fuckery has happened on the target box to mess up licensing in the transplanted installation.
It's also pretty common for Windows to demand re-validation if it finds itself running on hardware that's substantially different to what it booted on last time, and if the original Windows license was one of the OEM/system-builder variants and the new mobo isn't from the same manufacturer as the old one, for that re-validation to fail.
Using slmgr.vbs to reset the installation product key to the one that came with the OEM's bloatware installation will fix this as long as the underlying Windows flavours are compatible.
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
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Whenever I do this, I generally do it by temporarily transplanting the new machine's main drive into the old machine alongside the existing one, then using a Linux live CD to make a complete block-for-block image of the old drive onto the newer one, then disconnecting the old drive, then booting the old machine up from the copy.
Then I'll use Windows' inbuilt disk management tool to resize partitions as necessary. Next, I'll use the Windows Device Manager to reinstall the disk and graphics cards using the standard Microsoft SATA and VGA drivers respectively. After doing that, my success rate at getting the new drive to boot Windows inside its own machine is about 95%.
Compared to earlier versions, Windows 10 does a really good job at pulling in all the drivers it needs from Windows Update. I have no reason to believe that Windows 11 would be worse at this. I have not needed to install OEM-provided drivers downloaded from vendor support sites for a very long time now.
Having got Windows to boot on the new box and update itself with new drivers, I'll clean out all the leftover old ones: open an administrative (elevated) CMD console, enter then turn on hidden devices in the Device Manager's View menu, then delete all devices that show up dimmed. There's apparently a free tool that does this more smoothly but I haven't used it and am not strongly motivated to: I like to look at each thing I'm deleting and think about why I'm doing so before going ahead, which is a workflow that Device Manager makes easy enough.
Any compelling reasons to migrate things by hand and use windows 11?
Only that entirely erasing a whole disk and starting from a clean installation of an absolutely vanilla Windows, using Microsoft's official installation media, avoids having to preserve all the cruft that Windows installations seem absolutely determined to build up over time. If your existing Windows 10 was originally installed clean, and you're still completely happy with its present state, and you don't think your new box is going to stay in service for longer than Windows 10 remains supported, then no.
At some point MS might put something exclusively into Windows 11's graphics stack that new games come to rely on, but afaik they have not yet done so and I think game devs would be insane to stop supporting Windows 10 for at least the next several years; there's a lot of it about.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]