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I am currently planning to upgrade my PC. This involves changing out the processor, motherboard and GPU.

I want to know if there is any way I can migrate Windows 10 keeping all my apps and files intact as it is to a new system.

The new system will have the following changes:

  • New Processor (Switching from Intel i5 3450 to AMD Ryzen/Threadripper)
  • New Motherboard (Currently on Gigabyte, will move to MSI motherboard)
  • New Storage Medium (Currently on HDD will move to M.2 NVME)
  • New GPU (Will be upgrading my Nvidia GPU)

Is there anything that can allow me to move my OS with my settings ?

  • Will making a system image help ?
  • Will a rearm help ?
  • Or should I just use Clonezilla to clone the partition ?

Any help.

Please let me know if any other info is required.

Thanks.

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We don't know the details of the algorithm used by Microsoft to fingerprint the hardware, so we don't know at what point Microsoft will decide that this is no longer the same computer and it requires buying a new Windows license. I believe that this would happen if you did all your changes in one go.

I would advice to do the changes in stages, taking a day or two between upgrades, while using the computer daily, so letting the Microsoft license servers have enough time to upgrade their hardware fingerprint of your computer.

The motherboard replacement is the most dangerous, so I would keep it to the last (unless the old one doesn't support some of your new hardware). Note that in the worst case, you could get in touch with Microsoft Support. They will usually help (but may ask for some proof).

As regarding the disk - you need to clone the entire disk, not partitions. Clonezilla is a Linux product, so I would advice using a Windows-only product, for example AOMEI Backupper Free. This is because different disk sizes will require resizing the Windows partition during the cloning.

In case of failure of the cloning, you will always have the old disk to fall back to, so don't reformat or delete anything until you have used the new disk for some time and are sure of its working well.

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  • I can't do the motherboard change in stages because my entire processor is changing from Intel to AMD. So what you are saying is that if I clone my entire boot disk and flash to an SSD, the machine will actually boot minus the activation ? The activation I can handle from Microsoft support, but I can't lose my data.
    – ng.newbie
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 16:50
  • Yes, this is it in a nutshell. The usual cloning method has the two disks inside the computer for cloning. If that's not possible, you need to use AOMEI (or other) to write a disk image to an external disk, then boot the same product from boot media to clone the image to disk. If using AOMEI, you will need to Create AOMEI Bootable CD/DVD/USB Based on Windows PE. Before doing the hardware change, test the boot media, to see that it can see the backup image and accept it.
    – harrymc
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 17:00

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