Transplanting drive from one machine to another

britechguy said:
Which comes right back to my point: I can't definitively know in a great many cases.

If Microsoft's own utilities are misleading, and clearly they are, then I'm sorry, but all bets are off. If I check a license using this utility on a machine unknown to me, and it says RETAIL, then that's what it is. Techs cannot be expected to know origins by divination.

For the sake of completeness, here's the output from the HP I'm typing on, which I know to have been a Windows 8.1 Home to Windows 10 Upgrade, done by me:

View attachment 13092
Click to expand...
That's also why Microsoft says if you cannot provide proof of purchase you have no license. These are recorded in digital delivery means, retail has a box if purchased via retail, etc.

But these things only matter in an audit... and no one MS included is going to bother to audit a home user or even most of the SMBs we support around here. It costs too much and provides too little benefit.
 
@Markverhyden post 10 and @britechguy post 20, on both your screenshots, the partial key is the same, im betting your full key its reading is YTMG3-N6DKC-DKB77-7M9GH-8HVX7 which is a Windows 10 Home generic key, when i run it i get the generic key for Windows 10 Pro which i know i am not using as this license was one i bought for Windows 7. britechguy you said yours is an upgrade, Markverhyden was your system upgraded from 7/8 as well or is that from a VM? If so i think Microsoft are writing the generic keys to slmgr for upgrades.
Britechguy, your partners laptop isnt using one of the generic keys, was that bought with Windows 10 already installed?
This doesnt really matter for the purposes of this thread, but an interesting discovery when/if we ever need to find a users license key.
 
Diggs said:
...interesting. My key also ends with 8HVX7. It is an upgraded Win7 > 10 machine. (It may have had a fresh Win10 ISO install long ago also.)
Click to expand...
It's one of the many keys used by the automatic upgrade process is why... that key is on a great many machines. That key is also not valid for fresh installs, it'll only work on units that have been preactivated. You used to have to put it in... but now the "I don't have a key" option will work almost all the time so there's no need to record these.
 
alexsmith2709 said:
@Markverhyden post 10 and @britechguy post 20, on both your screenshots, the partial key is the same, im betting your full key its reading is YTMG3-N6DKC-DKB77-7M9GH-8HVX7 which is a Windows 10 Home generic key, when i run it i get the generic key for Windows 10 Pro which i know i am not using as this license was one i bought for Windows 7. britechguy you said yours is an upgrade, Markverhyden was your system upgraded from 7/8 as well or is that from a VM? If so i think Microsoft are writing the generic keys to slmgr for upgrades.
Britechguy, your partners laptop isnt using one of the generic keys, was that bought with Windows 10 already installed?
This doesnt really matter for the purposes of this thread, but an interesting discovery when/if we ever need to find a users license key.
Click to expand...
The first one I posted was from a VM with an unactivated W10 Home install so I'd expect the gen key @alexsmith2709. The second one is from a W10 Pro MAPS activated install and the last block matches the key entered. I do know from past history that OEM's had different SLP's. No a lot but I'd see different keys from the same OEM but widely different models. I know they were SLP's because they did not match the label on the machine. Haven't seen many W10 but I'd expect something similar. For M$ purposes the license key is just part of the process of creating a type of UUID for each machine. Once activated you don't need the key again if you are installing the same version OS since it will generate the same UUID. So it makes sense that they would report a generic key using slmgr
 
Transplanting old Win 10 PC drives to a new PC has worked well for me in the past. However, it didn't work for me on a job yesterday, in spite of a lot of work trying to do so. (Dell Inspiron 15-5555 to HP 15-dy2088ca in this case.) The new PC couldn't detect the "old" PC drive and the BIOS had no Legacy option that I could find. I disabled Secure Boot but could not find a Fast Boot option. Here's the summary.

- try to install Dell HDD in new HP 15-dy2088ca laptop to run as did on Dell
- Win 10 Home; Windows is activated; has M.2 NVME SSD, no SATA connector/mounts
- remove SSD, connect to my PC to create back-up image: can't access: Bitlocker locked
- back up 645.46MB Dell HDD user data to my RAID with Fabs Autobackup Pro
- log into HP, back up Bitlocker key and print it as PDF on Desktop and my flash drive
- turn off Bitlocker; create backup image of Dell HD and HP SSD drive with HDClone
- restore Dell image to HP's SSD, install SSD in HP laptop
- BSOD: "inaccessible boot device"; disable Secure Boot in HP; no legacy boot option?
- unable to boot SSD with Dell image on it because Legacy boot unavailable
- restore original HP image to the SSD and install it in HP
- enable Bitlocker, print Bitlocker key as PDF on Desktop; also saved in Lynn's MS account

I'd be grateful to know if there was something I should have done to make this work, as it was a lot of wasted time and the customer was unable to use programs on the old HDD that are no longer available. Fortunately, the next job that entailed the same requirement went just fine.
 
Last edited:
The old drive was initialized GPT so I'm not sure Legacy is even required to recognize it, but I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to Secure boot, Legacy boot, and UEFI. Unfortunately, the old Dell motherboard is dead so it's not possible to get into its BIOS to see what boot options it was using. I understood that Legacy/CMS boot is only required when trying to boot a MBR-initialized drive with a UEFI BIOS. Some allow "UEFI/Legacy but UEFI first," but not this HP.
 
Diggs said:
It is usually newer Dells that I no longer find Legacy boot an option, not HPs.
Click to expand...
Let me correct you... that's INTEL!

www.anandtech.com

Intel to Remove Legacy BIOS Support from UEFI by 2020

www.anandtech.com www.anandtech.com

It's 2021, legacy boot is gone from all current platforms, AMD did the same thing for all the same reasons. You will EFI boot now, because you have no choice. But as this happened in 2020, encountering an EFI only machine in the wild is still a little uncommon. But it will quickly become the norm.
 
Larry Sabo said:
Transplanting old Win 10 PC drives to a new PC has worked well for me in the past. However, it didn't work for me on a job yesterday, in spite of a lot of work trying to do so. (Dell Inspiron 15-5555 to HP 15-dy2088ca in this case.) The new PC couldn't detect the "old" PC drive and the BIOS had no Legacy option that I could find. I disabled Secure Boot but could not find a Fast Boot option. Here's the summary.

- try to install Dell HDD in new HP 15-dy2088ca laptop to run as did on Dell
- Win 10 Home; Windows is activated; has M.2 NVME SSD, no SATA connector/mounts
- remove SSD, connect to my PC to create back-up image: can't access: Bitlocker locked
- back up 645.46MB Dell HDD user data to my RAID with Fabs Autobackup Pro
- log into HP, back up Bitlocker key and print it as PDF on Desktop and my flash drive
- turn off Bitlocker; create backup image of Dell HD and HP SSD drive with HDClone
- restore Dell image to HP's SSD, install SSD in HP laptop
- BSOD: "inaccessible boot device"; disable Secure Boot in HP; no legacy boot option?
- unable to boot SSD with Dell image on it because Legacy boot unavailable
- restore original HP image to the SSD and install it in HP
- enable Bitlocker, print Bitlocker key as PDF on Desktop; also saved in Lynn's MS account

I'd be grateful to know if there was something I should have done to make this work, as it was a lot of wasted time and the customer was unable to use programs on the old HDD that are no longer available. Fortunately, the next job that entailed the same requirement went just fine.
Click to expand...
Would be surprised that the HP would require legacy boot as it came with win 10.
Some cases I had to reset the secure keys to default in order to be able to disable secure boot and still have to boot in UEFI mode though. SATA set on AHCI definitely.
One Dell technicien did tell me the keys are both Pro/Home valid and you just pick what you want (don't know about HP). So even when shifting a home drive to a machine that was running pro as long as the hardware is not way off different it will validate the licence from the copy on the UEFI of the mobo.
The only times I've ever had problems with re-activation were clean installs on white boxes with significant hardware changes. And then again if I could get access to the client's MS account that could be de-authorised and transferred to the new setup provided the version is the same, home or pro.
 
Rigo said:
I had to reset the secure keys to default in order to be able to disable secure boot and still have to boot in UEFI mode though. SATA set on AHCI definitely.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the tip. I'll see if I can get the laptop back to try again but I'm wary of doing anything I'm ignorant about, fearing it may render the laptop unbootable with the original drive. I like to know what I'm the hell I'm doing before jumping into the deep end. :)
 
I have done this a few times with older computer having problems installing with iso suprised a machine that had Home activated with Pro without entering serial
It's a lot easier not having to install most App's I have only done it on a customers machine when there was no other option.
This could rarely be done with past OS's
 
The ability for Windows to use CSM or EFI is in the firmware files used for boot. The base Windows files don't have a "platform" dependency per se. So, if you use dism to image just the Windows partition, you can then restore that image on any platform of your choice once you have partitioned and formatted it correctly.

For example:

Code: 
dism /capture-image /imagefile:c:\yourpathhere\image.wim /name:Windows /capturedir:z:\

Will create a wim file with just the Windows files from that disk. Now, prep a blank disk for GPT like this using diskpart and replacing x with the new or old disk as needed but remember the clean command destroys all partitions so make sure it's the right one.

Code: 
select disk x
clean
convert gpt
create part msr size=128
create part EFI size=128
format quick fs=fat32
assign letter=a
create part primary
format quick fs=NTFS
assign letter=z
Exit

Now, you restore the image you created before:

Code: 
dism /apply-image /imagefile:c:\pathtoyourimage\image.wim /applydir:z: /index:1

Next update boot files from CMD:

Code: 
bcdboot z:\windows /s a: /f uefi

And now you have converted a old Windows 10 install to a fresh disk using uefi using nothing but built in Windows tools.
 
Just as an addendum to my last post, just because a drive is formatted gpt doesn't mean that it is using direct UEFI.

For example, the Rufus USB installer tool makes a NTFS enabled Windows installer that installs as a UEFI install, but it uses a UEFI boot utility to do that even though it's running on legacy or csm. Linux also has been doing something similar when I installed to even old Core2Quad machine, disks were partition as GPT.

So the above method can seperate Windows from any loaders that were used and will enable you to boot Windows from EFI even of the previous install may have looked like it was already EFI ready.
 
Windows installations are registered to the motherboard, I would assume through a MAC address list on Microsoft's servers. I haven't seen any evidence that the registry hives mentioned above get queried during a validation check unless it's a brand new motherboard. I have found that as long as the mobo has already been associated with Windows, it will stay that way. So transplanting a drive is only an issue in terms of drivers (which can cause fatal errors on boot).

Two things about this discussion stick out to me: folks trying to boot without UEFI(why?), and trying to transplant a drive with all the software etc. intact. Any time I transplant a drive, I always back up the user's data and do a fresh install of Windows on the new machine. This bypasses any possible issues with drivers, TPM, etc. Unless there is software that cannot be readily reinstalled or replaced at no cost, trying to transplant a drive intact isn't worth the trouble.

Heck, even if there's special one-of-a-kind software to move, I'd rather move just that program than try to transplant a whole drive. Manually reinstalling it from an image of the original drive is much easier than trying to track down all the little inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies.
 
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