[SOLVED] Cloning HDD from old pc to SSD for new rig

[idiaz40]

Okay.. so i have an old 2008 pc with a 240gb HDD with OEM windows 10 pro version (originally it was windows 7 but i upgradred to windows 10 for free when Microsoft was giving free upgrades) and i was wondering if i could clone the old pc HDD to an M.2 Nvme for another system i am personally building. I did reset the old pc so it is clean and wiped..
My plan is to reset my old pc to start off clean.. next i would install Macrium Reflect to “Clone” the HDD.
Once its downloaded, i would remove the HDD from my old pc and install it and boot from it on my new rig.
Once in, i would start the clone to the m.2 and hopefully clone either the OS or the whole hdd (its empty).
Is this possible? It is an OEM it came with the laptop. Any ideas how to do it? What other programs for cloning should i use? Thanks for taking your time to read my confusion!

 

[DSzymborski]

Thiis is a very poor way to install Windows 10. You want to install Windows 10 on the PC you're going to use it on not on the old PC. Windows is not intended to be a modular OS unless you have a very specific Windows-to-Go install (and you would absolutely know if you did). Windows 10 tries its best to compensate -- much better than in past Windows versions -- but the proper way to do it is to install on the new PC. When we're talking about Windows 10 installed on hardware from more than a decade ago to a new system in 2020, this is not a good idea at all.

And more importantly, there's no actual benefit to doing this. Your key should work since this was an upgrade from Windows 7; if the old PC had an OEM Windows 10 rather than an upgrade to Windows 10, that would be a different matter. But if your key has problems on a new build, installing on the old PC and transplanting the data would not be a workaround for that problem as Windows checks the key against the motherboard.