Cloned drive for different computer?

[ohhgourami]

From what I understand, I can clone drives for a different computer as long as all the parts on both computers are the same? Is it possible even with a different processor (G630 then to i3-2120)? Must both drives be the same?

 

[RetiredChief]

First:
Clonning is a sector by sector copy from one drive to the other. End result is an exact duplicate.
Migration selectively copy the HDD to the 2nd HDD.

Do not recommend coning if going to a new system as Your drivers most likely will be Hosed. ie Hard disk controller, IEEE, audio could all have the incorrect driver. ONLY asking for Troubles.
There are some Cloning programs that are really a migration program, in that it allows you to remove drivers. When booting to the New system, windows will find "new Hardware" and load it's default drivers, then you can update these drivers as needed.

In this case, what I recommend is a Clean install. You can obtain a program that will then migrate ALL your Applications from old -> new.

 

[Outlander_04]

For the cloning itself, that is, creating a strict copy of a disk, any hardware apart from the hard disk, is irrelevant.

till you tray and connect the cloned drive to another mb and boot . At that point its going to fail unless its identical hardware , and windows will probably need to be reactivated even if you can get it to boot .

I dont believe MS would open the door to such obvious software piracy

 

[bucknutty]

As long as the hardware is similar it should be ok.... For example I have swaped a p67 mobo with a z68, both are intel boards, when booted windows had to detect ne hard ware and we were good to go.

I tried putting a hard drive from an nforce 750i in an intel board and it would only blue screen. But if i put the hard drive from the intel board into the nvidea board it worked fine, i just had to install the nforce drivers.

It really is a crapshot... if the drivers installed on the hdd for the disk controler and chipset are close enough to the new board, or computer then it should work, but in practice there really is no good way to check.

Best bet is to always do a clean install with a board of a newer or different chipset.