Hey Guru, I am finally upgrading from Haswell in a week or so. Starting all my backups and moving game data, but wondered if I could just move my OS drive to the X570 board. Have any of y'all had luck just doing a migration from older Intel to modern AMD without a clean install? If so, how did you go about it? Did you have to remove any drivers/programs pre or post migration? Any performance degradation that was only solved by a clean install? Currently on Windows 10 1909. Thanks!
I switched from i5-6600k to Ryzen 3700X without a reinstall. While this same installation of Windows 10 works mostly, games run normally, etc, I'm going to do a clean reinstall once I get around to it. There are some problems with usb ports and such. So, no, I wouldn't recommend it from my personal experience. I wanted to avoid reinstalling all the software, but unfortunately laziness doesn't always produce the best results...
I would do a fresh install. It's not about performance degradation, more about conflicts in drivers that can occur. Installing windows takes 10 minutes if not less, setting things up after that you can do gradually over the next couple of days and you'll have everything back up and running as you have it now. It's worth it, especially if the windows install is fairly old.
I recently went fom an I7 7700k on z270 to Amd R7 3800x on x570 with the same os drive....didnt even ask for re-activation, i would make sure you remove all traces of intel before the switch, i used ddu in normal mode and the switch went smoothly.
Before change your motherboard, run sysprep command and check generalize option, now change your motherboard and you will be fine
I also had no problem switching from Intel G4560 to Ryzen 1700 with the same OS, all it did was reconfigure the hardware again at boot.
isnt this consider major changes? are even retail keys supposed to transfer activation like this on windows 10?
If you just use the same installation, that is, the same SSD, a retail version reactivation should be no problem online. However, if you do a clean install with new hardware, the problem is that MS wouldn't automatically know the old PC is gone and could view it as trying to use a single license on two PCs at the same time. So, it might require a phone call. If you have the license linked to your MS account, you could potentially handle it online without the phone call. Since I did use the old installation, and it reactivated automatically, if I do a clean install now, it also will be no problem because no hardware would change. But if I had done a clean install immediately on this new PC, it's possible I'd have needed to call MS to tell them the old PC is gone. There's a shell command you can use to free the serial on the old PC, removing the activation, but apparently that information isn't delivered to Microsoft at all, based on what I've read. So, it doesn't work like uninstalling Office, for example. Thus, I'm not sure what use the whole thing is, despite having read a tutorial or two.
ok so IF and WHEN rebuild my pc and I dont have another retail key I could just swap out my mother board and cpu and leave my SSD with my OS on alone and let reactivate? after which i can do clean install? I do have it linked my MS account too well as far as I know it is linked to my MS account, linked once my pc then just unlinked my MS account and log in locally since. is there way yo see if the MS account has key linked to it via there website?
I know that if you use a Microsoft account that has a digital license tied to it to login into Windows 10, you can switch your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. When trying to activate windows, It will just notify if you want to revoke the activation from the previous motherboard and carry it to the new one by way of your licensed Microsoft account. For a single-use license key that was used by an OEM to activate windows on a motherboard, you will need to purchase a new key to activate windows on a new motherboard. With Windows 10, once activated your motherboard becomes your license key (like how a BIOS oem key on a Dell computer was purposed for), unless you have a license tied to your Microsoft account or the license key you purchased is transferable.
Yeah, I understand this is the ideal way. Given the amount of time on my hands these days I may end up going both routes and running game/synthetic bencmarks to see if things differ. Thanks for the input, this is the kind of stuff I was wondering about. I'm considering moving the OS drive to the new computer, letting it activate and then doing a refresh of Windows. Maybe that way I can keep files and still get fresh Windows. I'll have to look into this, haven't heard about it before. Thanks for the heads up. Considering the fact that my last parts won't arrive until May 8th, it may be some time before I update this thread with progress or results. I do greatly appreciate the responses!
I honestly had zero issues swapping from a 4790K/Z97 to a 2700/X470 on Windows 10. Windows 8-10 will reconfigure itself when it detects specific changes (storage/memory controller). Sysprep has the most value in mass deployments, where you don't want multiple machines on the same network having the same IDs after imaging. When Windows 10 sees completely different motherboard components its basically going to do a sysprep on its own.
