Windows specifically does not support being booted from a drive connected via USB. The only exception is Windows To Go installations, but those involve special preparation and enterprise licensing. Your only bet here is to install your drive internally or clone your drive to the existing internal drive. Then you have to get that “foreign” installation booting on your new hardware. If you’re very lucky, it will just work, but more likely the old PC’s Windows environment will be configured to load the wrong drivers for that new hardware and you’ll end up with a blue screen. The paid versions of Macrium Reflect, a popular disk cloning and imaging application, include a tool called ReDeploy, which is explicitly intended to get Windows installations to boot on dissimilar hardware, so you could buy that application, create its bootable Rescue Media, and trying the ReDeploy wizard in that bootable environment after you’ve gotten that old PC’s Windows environment loaded onto an internal drive.
But even after all of that, if the old PC is running a different version of Windows than the new one is licensed for, there’s a good chance that even if you get Windows running, it will fall out of activation on that new PC.
Another option you could consider if you have a Pro version of Windows on the new PC would be running the old PC’s Windows environment as a VM. Even the FREE version of Macrium Reflect includes a tool called viBoot that is meant to allow you to boot disk images as VMs. So you could just use Reflect to capture an image of your old PC’s disk, then boot it as a Hyper-V VM on the new PC. Similar to ReDeploy, viBoot includes functionality to get that Windows environment booting properly in a VM, although again this capability is in the free version. But you still might have Windows activation issues.
Apart from that, there are some applications that claim to be able to migrate installed applications to new PCs, but they’re hit or miss at best, and sometimes the migrated applications can create new problems, such as becoming impossible to run, update, or uninstall and reinstall — in which case you’re stuck. Not having the installers for your applications is usually a major problem.
JOcean
9 Legend
•
12.6K Posts
0
November 19th, 2019 19:00
Have you tried using the media creation tool and creating a bootable full install copy of Windows 10?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows10
jphughan
9 Legend
•
14K Posts
1
November 19th, 2019 19:00
Windows specifically does not support being booted from a drive connected via USB. The only exception is Windows To Go installations, but those involve special preparation and enterprise licensing. Your only bet here is to install your drive internally or clone your drive to the existing internal drive. Then you have to get that “foreign” installation booting on your new hardware. If you’re very lucky, it will just work, but more likely the old PC’s Windows environment will be configured to load the wrong drivers for that new hardware and you’ll end up with a blue screen. The paid versions of Macrium Reflect, a popular disk cloning and imaging application, include a tool called ReDeploy, which is explicitly intended to get Windows installations to boot on dissimilar hardware, so you could buy that application, create its bootable Rescue Media, and trying the ReDeploy wizard in that bootable environment after you’ve gotten that old PC’s Windows environment loaded onto an internal drive.
But even after all of that, if the old PC is running a different version of Windows than the new one is licensed for, there’s a good chance that even if you get Windows running, it will fall out of activation on that new PC.
Another option you could consider if you have a Pro version of Windows on the new PC would be running the old PC’s Windows environment as a VM. Even the FREE version of Macrium Reflect includes a tool called viBoot that is meant to allow you to boot disk images as VMs. So you could just use Reflect to capture an image of your old PC’s disk, then boot it as a Hyper-V VM on the new PC. Similar to ReDeploy, viBoot includes functionality to get that Windows environment booting properly in a VM, although again this capability is in the free version. But you still might have Windows activation issues.
Apart from that, there are some applications that claim to be able to migrate installed applications to new PCs, but they’re hit or miss at best, and sometimes the migrated applications can create new problems, such as becoming impossible to run, update, or uninstall and reinstall — in which case you’re stuck. Not having the installers for your applications is usually a major problem.
CWinAustin
2 Posts
0
November 20th, 2019 07:00
Thanks for the tips. I like the idea of running the Win10 image as a VM. I'll check out Macrium Reflect.
Chris.