When you say that you've created an external system SSD from your win7 laptop, what do you mean? Are you trying to use a disk with a system image from another laptop, different model and make, to boot your new 9500?

And also, what do you mean when you say that you have changed your BIOS settings from Raid to UEFI? Did you mean from Raid to AHCI? But what difference would it make if your external disk is presumably USB connected?

So you want to clone your external SSD to your internal SSD? I think you're going the wrong way about it..? I don't even think you can clone an image on the disk you're actually using, it doesnät seem technically feasible..? But anyway, if the w7 cloned image comes from a different machine, with presumably different hardware, it will have different drivers installed, and so even IF it booted up (big if) there would be a lot of conflicts.

I'm not an expert, I'm sure there will be a lot of people here able to help you out, but there are a couple of things that don't seem correct.

Thanks for the reply Tatolino,

Yes quite right, I did actually mean Raid to AHCI, sorry about that.

What I did was clone my Win 7 drive to an external SSD, then put that SSD into the XPS. It was not recognized at all. Fiddled a bit but still no go.

Generally speaking it is possible to move from an i5 to an i7 even between brands, from i7 to i5 etc. The OS just thinks about it for a bit while it sorts out the relevant drivers.

However it seems the issue is as Thorium mentioned, Win 7 will not run at all on this model of XPS.

I confirmed that by trying to boot from a Win 7 Install disk (external CD drive) and it just did not want to play ball.

Thanks for replying.

Cheers

Thanks for the reply Thorium,

I had no idea this was the case.

After your comment I also confirmed that by trying to boot from a Win 7 Install disk (external CD drive) and it just did not want to play ball.

A real shame as I have heaps of technical apps on the Win 7 machine and it will take days for me to reinstall then all on Win 10. 

A question - If I do an upgrade on the Win7  by booting from a Win10 Install disk, will that do the trick for me. ?

I heard years back people talking about upgrading Win7 to Win10 was a mess, slowed the OS down, etc etc, and the recommendation was to do a clean install. 

Has this changed, any idea if it is Ok these days to do an upgrade and not end up with a bowl of spaghetti ?

Cheers

It's a recipe for endless troubleshooting - no, it's not a good idea.  The greatest probability is that you'll wind up reinstalling all the software anyway -- and it's better to do that one by one, as there's a high probability at least some of them either (a) will need updates or upgrades or  (b) won't work at all with WIndows 10.  At least you'll know which ones they are.

Fair enough, thanks for the feedback. 

Cheers

@Krammig  You can't start an in-place upgrade by booting to Windows install media.  If you do that and click Upgrade, you'll see a message telling you to start Windows Setup from within the Windows environment you want to upgrade.  But if you can't boot the environment in the first place, then that's a non-starter.

That said, if you really, REALLY wanted to do this, you probably could get Windows 7 running at least somewhat reasonably on that XPS.  But it would involve jumping through quite a few hoops.  First, if your original system was set up for Legacy BIOS booting, which is very likely with Windows 7, then you'd have to perform a custom image restore onto a disk that had been pre-staged for UEFI booting by having the appropriate GPT partition layout and the appropriate EFI and MSR partitions to facilitate UEFI booting -- rather than just restoring your image backup wholesale onto your disk overwriting all of its contents.  But then the storage drivers would be a whole other problem.  In this case RAID is actually better because AHCI exposes the native storage interface, but Windows 7 has no native NVMe support, you can't get Windows 7 running on NVMe SSDs in AHCI mode unless you have custom AHCI NVMe Win7 drivers from your SSD manufacturer AND slipstream them into your Windows environment.  That's even more hoops.  RAID in this case actually makes things somewhat easier because in that case the Intel Rapid Storage controller abstracts that from the OS, which makes it possible to run Win7 from NVMe SSDs, as long as you have the Intel Rapid Storage driver set up.  If your SOURCE system was using RAID mode, then it would.  But then there's the question of whether the specific Rapid Storage driver version contained in that Windows environment is actually new enough for the Rapid Storage controller in your new system.  It probably isn't.  But if your source system was in AHCI mode, which might have worked for that source system if it was using a SATA SSD, then the Windows environment itself would be expecting to boot on an AHCI system, in which case you can't just work around that by switching the new system to RAID.  Windows doesn't automatically adapt to certain changes in boot-critical hardware.  Some imaging applications like Macrium Reflect include utilities that can perform offline tweaks to images restored from other hardware specifically to work around limitations like this, but I don't know if AOMEI offers this.  But without that, you can't simply switch even the SAME system between RAID and AHCI and expect your existing Windows environment to continue booting properly.

If your head is hurting a bit after reading all of the above, then you probably don't want to embark on trying to get your Windows 7 environment running in some haphazard way well enough to facilitate an in-place upgrade.  You might spend even more time trying to get it to work than you would have just starting over from scratch, and at least starting over from scratch gives you a cleaner environment in the end.