Question Booting from old AMI UEFI drive on current motherboards

[ralusnom]

Some background: My "current" PC runs on an ASRock Z87M Pro4, which has a BIOS from 2016. There I actually managed to install an M.2 drive (M.2 or SSD probably doesn't matter, just as a side info) as main and bootable harddrive. Now, however, the box is too old for Windows11, as the CPU is too old and TPM is not even present to begin with.

The question I have: If I now put together a new PC, and install the existing system disk, could that cause problems when booting? Because the BIOS, boot versions, whatever, are not compatible? I think I read about such problems once. Ultimately I want to avoid having to reinstall all the software that is on it.

Thank you guys for the help!

 

[USAFRet]

Some background: My "current" PC runs on an ASRock Z87M Pro4, which has a BIOS from 2016. There I actually managed to install an M.2 drive (M.2 or SSD probably doesn't matter, just as a side info) as main and bootable harddrive. Now, however, the box is too old for Windows11, as the CPU is too old and TPM is not even present to begin with.

The question I have: If I now put together a new PC, and install the existing system disk, could that cause problems when booting? Because the BIOS, boot versions, whatever, are not compatible? I think I read about such problems once. Ultimately I want to avoid having to reinstall all the software that is on it.

Thank you guys for the help!

That is highly unlikely to work.

With a new system and old drive+OS, 3 possible outcomes:

1. It works
2. It fails completely
3. It "works", but you're chasing issues for weeks/months.

Given the age of that, I'd expect #2, with a small possibility of #3.

 

[ralusnom]

The drive is not that old and at least it runs the latest Win10 version. But yes, the hardware apart from Drive+OS is really quite old.

Well, then I will best look forward to all or of of the 3 options. What can be done to make sure I can continue to use the data or software? Use something like Acronis?

 

[USAFRet]

The drive is not that old and at least it runs the latest Win10 version. But yes, the hardware apart from Drive+OS is really quite old.

Well, then I will best look forward to all or of of the 3 options. What can be done to make sure I can continue to use the data or software? Use something like Acronis?

The physical age of the drive is irrelevant.

Don't try to boot from it.

Copy your personal data off to some other drive.
Data, not applications.


Then, with that safe and offline, you can try booting up with this in some new hardware.
Unlikely to actually work 100%, but you can give it a try.

A Windows install is not as modular as we'd all like. Not meant for simply moving between different hardware.
And the greater the difference, the less likely it is to work.


Lastly, do you want to drag along several years of old gunk into your new system?
How long would it take to do the OS install and reinstall whatever applications you actually use today?
Windows, maybe half hour. The rest, a day or two, at most?

 

[pctech2005]

For years I used Acronis but they have muddled up the software by including antimalware protection and getting away from what they did best. You could try belenaEtcher to clone the drive and test.

 

[USAFRet]

For years I used Acronis but they have muddled up the software by including antimalware protection and getting away from what they did best. You could try belenaEtcher to clone the drive and test.

A clone is no different than doing it with the original physical drive.

 

[ralusnom]

Thanks guys! I already thought to myself that it won't work out that way. I just wanted to get the last confirmation. This computer is my development computer and I have been configuring and adjusting a lot for years until it all worked. It's not just about data and software, but all the configurations as well. Be it Docker, symlinks, Linux subsystem data, registry tweaks, PATH settings, whatnot.... This can all be managed, I know, but I wanted to try the easier way first, also following the motto: "Never touch a running system". However, the initial idea would probably rather become a "Never run a touchy system". If I had known Ansible back then, I might have done such tweaks just like that. But, how often do you do something like that... every 10 years, when Windows doesn't support the hardware anymore maybe.

Well, I will go the long way and rebuild everything. The work data is of course external, or outside the system drive. Nevertheless, Native Instruments and Ableton libraries with probably 50GB of data (yes, stupidly) are still there. So it will be an exciting, busy year - at least on this level.

Thanks again and have a blessed new year!