VOGONS

Windows 10 - Using pre-installed C: drives on new/different machines

Topic actions

First post, by Kerr Avon

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

How reliable is Windows 10's 'Hot Swap' ability (or whatever it's technically called)? The one where you can take a hard drive, that contains a working installation of Windows 10, and insert it into a different PC or laptop and then when you boot the new machine then Windows 10 boots up fine and autodetects the new hardware? I've never used it for disparate hardware, as I don't have too much trust for Windows when it comes to drivers and such, so I've always installed Windows 10 from scratch.

So if, say, I have Windows 10 and some utilities installed on a desktop that has an AMD CPU and a Radeon GPU, then if I take a disc image of the C: drive, and copy that disc image over a new hard drive, and insert that new hard drive into a laptop that has an Intel CPU and an Invidia GPU, will the laptop boot up properly and change it's drivers appropriately?

And if so, are there any potential problems or issues that I should watch out for.

Thanks for any answers.

Reply 1 of 2, by cyclone3d

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

It may work or it may completely crash and burn.

Best way is to do a Sysprep on the drive so it uninstalls all the drivers.

If not running a Sysprep, you can easily run into issues with the driver for the drive controller and not being able to boot at all.

Sometimes switching between AHCI and RAID in the BIOS can help, but I wouldn't really trust that when going between different systems.

You are also going to run into the issue of having the same activation key on multiple machines unless you are replacing a machine.

If you want to set up an image for multiple machines, do you setup and updates and installs you want on all machines and then Sysprep that drive and use imagex with gimagex to pull an image and you can also use it to image other machines.

There are other imaging software, but might as well use the free MS one.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 2 of 2, by DosFreak

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

You should always preload the drivers (bare minimum storage and NIC) for the destination hardware and perform a sysprep when using the install on another machine
Also keep in mind that when you "install" Windows 10 that you are actually deploying an image.

If you are in a situation where you couldn't perform a sysprep and the system will not boot likely due to storage drivers not being available then recovery mode should work to get it bootable.

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Make your games work offline

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to Milliways
Close window
Close window