Question Migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10

[Pacman45]

Finally biting the bullet and upgrading to Windows 10. First I needed a new motherboard. Got the Gigabyte z390 Aorus Pro and Intel i7 9700K CPU. Loaded into computer. Tried to start up on Windows 7 to do the migration, but keyboard and mouse won’t work. They worked in BIOS, but not when Windows loads. What to do? I just need to get in to do the upgrade to Windows 10. Can’t do the upgrade on the old motherboard (Asus P6X58-E.

 

[jeremyj_83]

The Intel 9 series and the z390 are not supported on Win 7.

 

[Pacman45]

That doesn't help me get out of my predicament. My old motherboard (ASUS P6X58-E) won't upgrade to Windows 10 because of no drivers. My new motherboard (Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Pro) won't run Windows 7 to do the update. Why did engineers allow that to happen? I thought backwards compatibility was a hallmark of the Intel chipset?

Can I upgrade the ASUS to Windows 8 and will that then run on the Z390?

 

[USAFRet]

With that level of parts change, migration is not indicated anyway.
You really need a clean install of Win 10 on the new hardware,


Where did the original Win 7 come from, and do you have the license key?

 

[Pacman45]

With that level of parts change, migration is not indicated anyway.
You really need a clean install of Win 10 on the new hardware,


Where did the original Win 7 come from, and do you have the license key?

I built the computer in 2011. Received an OMEI version with my kit from Newegg. I have the Win 7 license.

 

[USAFRet]

So...

Build the new PC
Install Win 10, and skip entering the license key.
Later, after it is all installed....apply your Win 7 license key.
It should activate.

Of course, this assumes that you're not going to use the old system with that Win 7 license anymore.

 

[USAFRet]

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

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[Pacman45]

I'm in big trouble. I built the Z390 with the i7 8-core 9700K and used a windows 10 boot USB to load Windows 10 on the PCIe NVME SSD I installed with it. All was running fine. I then hooked up the hard drives that Windows 7 used to run on with the intent of transfering as much data as I could from those hard drives (Outlook .pst and .ost files, download files, etc.). All of a sudden, blue screen of death. On reboot the system does not find the SSD drive. No matter what I do, I can't get to it. No worries I think. I'll just put my old motherboard back in and hook up my hard drives and stick with Windows 7 awhile so I can get some work done. No go! System does not recognize any bootable drive. I tried installing a Windows 7 repair disk into the CD drive, and it said that the version of computer repair on the disk was not compatible with my version of Windows. Did hooking my hard drives up to the Windows 10 machine change the boot sector on those drives? I have no idea what to do now, short of going out and buying a new system.

 

[Pacman45]

So, after a sleepless night and talking with the local Computer Guy in Warwick, I played around with the BIOS on the old ASUS motherboard. Apparently the SATA cables from my hot swap bays didn't get back into the original SATA ports and that messed up the boot order. The Windows Repair function will not work if a non-system disk is in a lower channel than the system disk. I did not know that. I finally got the Windows Repair to recognize the boot drive and it is now performing its magic. At least I'll have my Windows 7 back!

 

[USAFRet]

So, after you get the system back to original working condition, what will be your next step or desire?

 

[Pacman45]

Right now I'm cloning my Windows 7 system drive to a spare HDD. I absolutely cannot afford to get stuck without this fallback. Also, because of the huge hassle of Outlook .PST and .OST files and the enormous amount of data there, I'm going to attempt an upgrade to Windows 8.1 on my old motherboard. If that is successful, I will switch out the motherboards and CPU once again, and boot to Windows 8.1 and then see if I can upgrade to Windows 10 from that point. Does that sound reasonable?

 

[Pacman45]

I may have to buy a new SSD. I don't know why the brand new one stopped working suddenly, but the z390 bios positively did not see it, and Windows 10 boot USB did not offer it as an option when I tried to start over last night. I don't have a lot of confidence in this NVME technology.

 

[USAFRet]

In place Upgrades often do not result in 100% perfect performance.

A clean install of the new OS, and move your personal data over to the new install.
Upgrading from 7 to 8.1 is probably no better than from 7 to 10.

 

[Pacman45]

I’m sure there will be headaches along the way. My biggest concern is not performance, but data access. Apart from the enormous task of locating all the install disks and codes from the software I’ve accumulated and in many cases, rely on for quick “right now” access, there’s the dreadful task of porting thousands of e-mails which are my records to a newer and frankly more lousy version of Outlook. I want to keep my Outlook 2010 as it is the last good version of Outlook. The way Microsoft hid data and made the import / export process so painful, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. If the migration process doesn’t work out, I will revert to Windows 7 on my old machine and buy an off-the-shelf Windows 10 machine and transfer at my own leisurely pace. (I’m so done with the do-it-yourself nightmare—it’s caused me high blood pressure and increased four letter word usage). Thanks for your input.

 

[USAFRet]

Assuming your Win 7 system still works, Belarc Advisor can do wonders for discovering some/most/all the license codes for your software.

 

[Pacman45]

Not getting very far with cloning my Windows 7 system HDD. The system HDD has a total capacity of 1 TB. The reserved system partition D: is about 68 GB with 29 GB being used, and the C: partition has about 932 GB capacity with about 430 GB being used. I’m trying to use EaseUS ToDo Backup to clone the two partitions to a second internal HDD with 2 TB capacity. The MBR and reserved system (D partition clone just fine and EaseUS ToDo reports the destination partition as A:. The problem is when it tries to clone the C: partition. Twice now the software hangs up about 5-10 minutes into it. The first time it hung up on the screensaver auto lock. Screen saver never fully loaded with password prompt and was unresponsive to any inputs, even 30 minutes later. I did a soft reset. The destination HDD was unreported in Windows Explorer and the Disk Management utility in Administrative Controls showed the drive as Drive 0, unallocated with no data. I initiated a second cloning operation. Once again the MBR and reserved system partition. Cloned just fine, but the C: partition froze 5 minutes and 34 seconds into the operation (53% complete) with the spinning blue circle appearing in the software window. System was once again unresponsive to keyboard or mouse commands. I waited 2 hours and then did another soft reset. Any thoughts on why this might be occurring?

 

[USAFRet]

"The reserved system partition D: is about 68 GB with 29 GB being used "

That is not right.
There seem to be major issues with this setup.

That system Reserved should be 100MB or 500MB.
Not multi GB.

Please show us a screencap of the actual Disk Management window.
Not EaseUS or anything...Disk Management from within Windows.

 

[Pacman45]

You are absolutely right. I was misled by the stupid not-to-scale Windows graphics of the used disk space for each partition. Now that I actually read the units I see that my reserved system space is indeed only 100 MB of which 29 MB are FREE. (So why did that take so long to clone?). The C: partition is the rest of the drive (932 GB is 2’s complement way of expressing the 999.9 GBs that are left on the disk). I did a little research on UEFI partitions and now understand why the disk is partitioned like that.

 

[USAFRet]

So if you're going to Win 10 and on a whole new motherboard, why the clone operation?

Where are you in this procedure?

 

[Pacman45]

Cloning operation complete...finally. I Cloned the Windows 7 HDD to make sure I could get back to Windows 7 if everything goes south. So now I'm rethinking my tactics on migrating to Windows 10 through Windows 8.1. The issue with migrating directly from Windows 7 to Windows 10 as detailed earlier is the lack of Windows 7 USB driver support on the Z390 motherboard. What if I did this: Buy a PCIe PS2 card and buy two USB-to-PS2 adaptors for my keyboard and mouse to plug into the PS2 card? Will the Z390 PS2 drivers (if any?) be able to deal with that kind of work around?

 

[USAFRet]

The fact still remains...your new Z390 hardware needs a clean install of Win 10.

When conditions are right, cloning can be a good option.
Major hardware change coupled with OS change is not it.

 

[Pacman45]

Yeah...I was going down that path and had Windows 10 running on the M2 mounted SSD and it just disappeared! Got Win10 version of Blue Screen of death and UEFI did not see the drive at all. So all the work I had done to that point...gone. If I try again, it won't be on SSD. I'll buy a brand new HDD, make one of my current internal HDDs and external drive and run it that way...but probably on the very last day Windows 7 is supported. I'm so frick'n mad at Microsoft right now. If it's this much trouble, I might as well switch to MAC.

 

[USAFRet]

HDD or SSD does not matter.

All you need to do is a clean install of Win 10 on your new hardware.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Pacman45]

So I'll order an HDD. I'm out of town the next 3 days so the clean install will have to wait until Thursday. Gives me some more time to poll other forums.

 

[Pacman45]

So I returned from business trip, installed new WD 2TB hard drive into my new system and when I booted Windows 10 from the installer USB stick, lo and behold the M.2 SSD drive was available again! So I loaded Windows 10 on the SSD and then hooked up the old hard drives from the Windows 7 system. I went through the laborious task of reinstalling software. I had to pay for some Microsoft Tech Support because I could not load my Outlook.com e-mail to Outlook 2010. It kept asking for Password, over and over and over. Finally had to set up as IMAP instead of Exchange server. Everything else is working swimmingly. I had to do a mass Share of all my Documents and Pictures and Music from my old hard drives so I can access them without doing Administrator override each time. Is there a way to permanently move all that data to the ownership of the new system and have it appear in the Documents and Music and Pictures icons? I'd like to keep them on the drives they're on, but just have them appear in my new systems' categories.