Hi everyone, i just bought a new laptop with a 5400rpm hard drive which has windows 8 on it. My old laptop had an SSD with windows 7. I just want to know if it's possible to switch the two? ie windows 8 on the SSD and windows 7 on the HDD. Thanks!
Transfer OS between Hard Drives?
zelda707 on 21/01/2014 - 21:50
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http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid+stat…
Be aware that the guide above does not take into account recovery partitions, which laptops generally come with.
If you are swapping out the hard drives for the laptops, be sure to also perform a full backup of their respective recovery partitions, and perhaps even store them on a USB drive somewhere.
This is really easy on Windows 8 — just type in "Recovery Drive" into the charms search bar and there is a Wizard that helps you make a bootable recovery USB drive or partition.probably a dumb question but how would i clone the drives if i can't have both HDD and SSD in the computer at once?
Either get another USB hard drive to dump the images in, or you can use another computer to hold the cloned data.
Basically, get yourself a portable USB drive — it's the simplest method.
Attach the USB drive to your machine(s) and do the cloning. After the clone you're going to want to do a quick format on your old drives before you put the cloned data onto your desired drives, before putting them into your laptops.
I find it's easier to just reinstall windows :P
can i use they key from my new laptop to download a new copy of windows 8 onto the SSD?
The key is attached to the motherboard, so no, it is generally not possible to activate it on a completely different machine.
If you reinstalled windows 8 on the same computer, that's fine, but because it will be under a different serial/etc it won't work :(
You should probably just give up on this idea unless you are willing to buy a seperate hard drive to swap data over onto while you clone HDD partitions across and then install drives or you're willing to pay a computer tech ~$200 to migrate two installs. Either way your looking at, at least half a day of your time or money down the drain.
In case you decide to go the hard route, look up Parted Magic. It's got a nice friendly graphical user interface.
Chances are the W8 install got customised to the hardware configuration so the only way to be sure of a trouble free setup is to reinstall W8 on the SSD. But if reinstall uses a recovery partition on the HD, rather than from DVDs, then it's problematic.
A similar story applies to W7 on the older machine.