Moving a system HD from a brand A to a brand B laptop?

Hello,

I have a Clevo laptop which I am about to sell. I am going to buy another model, I don't know from which brand yet.

The fact is I don't want to reinstall everything (Windows 10 and lots of programs) so I plan to extract the hard disk from my old laptop and put it into the new one.

Is it a safe practice or should I avoid to do it?

 

Generally it is best to avoid this kind of thing because the system apps and settings will be very different. But having said that there are apps that can transfer selected installs (ghosting) onto different units

Sent from my SM-G960F using Tapatalk

 

It will work. Meaning that it will boot up, and your programs and data should hopefully be there, and work as they should (no guarantees).

This is the lazy way to get a new platform going, though.

Instead of going from a working system (albeit old) to potentially two non-working systems, do this instead:

Buy a new SSD. Install via Windows 10 USB installer (use Rufus to create from this iso), I would wait until the May 1903 version of the Win10 installer is available. OP the SSD by 33% before installing Windows for the first time.

After Win10x64 is installed, proceed to fully update it, rebooting a few times and then begin installing, while testing, each driver and utility the new platform needs.

After the above step proves stable and as fast as it should be, begin installing your required programs. Don't just install everything you have now, see what you can do without and what the new platform can possibly do vs. your old one.

After fully testing the above scenarios with all your programs running flawlessly, this is where I would start migrating any data you need to the new platform.

After at least a week/month or so of actual use, this is where the old notebook would become decommissioned and either rebuilt to be sold/donated/given away or properly disposed of.

Will simply putting the old drive into the new computer work. Most likely (again: no guarantees of how it will work).

Will you be taking a huge chance by effectively trashing your current, working (assumed), platform and the Data it contains too? 100% yeah.

 

If OP used Macrium Reflect Imaging then Use Restore to different Hardware config and if possible sysprep /generalize will do the trick. Its a PITA to get it right. Look at CloneApp to backup everything to safe location and then Clean install everything and restore the backup. It should work w/o issues and saves a lot of headaches too.

 

It should work just fine. You might want to manually remove absent devices from device manager afterwards.