Moving files to a new computer, and Windows to a VM on it

[wilbur4321]

In moving to the new computer, considerations.

I'm NOT moving my windows installation to be the boot on the new computer. It's years old and has lots of stuff I don't need, etc. But, I'm not willing to chance losing anything.

I'm not sure if the SSD from the old computer will be usable on the new (it's a volume in an Intel RST raid; the new computer has a Z370 BIOS.... also, the SSD is hideously slow, and might be failing).

So, I'm planning on copying files off to an external drive, just file copy (user home directory, after deleting internet caches, removing android VMs, etc).

And I'm going to attempt to do a Hyper-V P2V transfer from the old system to a VM on the new one (they're both directly hardwired to a high end gigabit router). I've done this only one time before, and with server OS then, so crossing fingers here.

Is there value to also, or instead, making either a windows image-based backup or a "boot to rescue disk and make a vhdx of it" backup of the old system?

Other ideas of the best way to accomplish this?

 

[johnbl]

generally you would not be able to move a raid formatted drive over to a new machine and read it unless you could also move the RAID controller. IE you have a raid controller on a card and not on the motherboard of the first machine.

for the old machine I would just make a network connection to the new machine and transfer files that I wanted to save. then take the windows license key and use it to install a virtual machine on the new machine (or sell the key/disks if they are valid non oem versions)

you can wipe the old SSD and run crystaldiskinfo.exe to read its smart data and get its firmware version.
many times just the firmware is outdated and can be updated but look at the smart data to see the estimate on the drive life. old SSD on raid hardware had a bunch of problems when they came out.