Moving exisitng hard drive from Intel platform to AMD ( and vice versa ) advice ??

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markoneswift

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#154640 3-Nov-2014 13:11

Hey everyone, just wanting to get peoples' thoughts on a machine swap I'm about to do. I have two PCs, one is my rig with Haswell i5 / SSD main drive and the other is my sons gaming rig with AMD FX-4100 / SATA standard main drive.

He needs more oomph for his gaming ( Star Citizen etc ) whereas I don't really use all the power of my machine so I grudgingly said I would swap. We both have profiles and programs with extensive mods, configs etc which I do not want to have to reinstall so I am thinking of transplanting the hard drives and swapping VGA cards.

I'm an IT guy of over twenty years experience so I can handle the potential issues. What I'm asking is whether anyone has tried this with Windows 8 / 8.1 and how did it cope ? In the past, this kind of swap would be a nightmare and involve running repair installs, imaging drives etc and all kinds of other horrors. I'm just wondering whether newer versions of Windows cope better with moving to a new hardware platform.

Any thoughts would be most appreciated :-)

Thanks

timmmay

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#1167589 3-Nov-2014 13:17

You're probably best using something like Macrium reflect free to back up each OS disk to a third disk then swap them over. I doubt you could just throw the hard drive in and have it work, likely lots of driver issues, plus licensing.

markoneswift

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#1167591 3-Nov-2014 13:23

Yep, you could be right for sure. I've just read an entire web page on the subject of swapping Intel to AMD and back and many people reckon Win 8 handles it fine. There are others who reckon it doesn't. I do have access to Shadow Protect IT Edition, so maybe I'll try taking an image and then restore to dissimilar hardware.

wellygary

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#1167600 3-Nov-2014 13:31

timmmay: plus licensing.

+1
At a min you will have to re-register Windows, (if either of the installs are non-retails this could be a problem),

I would back up each drive before you attempt this, as if you get stuck somewhere in the driver re-install process you might not be able to get it to start up on either machine...

antoniosk

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#1167623 3-Nov-2014 13:53

Windows 7 migration tool is not too bad (not a patch on mac though) from old system to new system, but you still have to build a new system disk from scratch and a fair whack will get lost in translation.

________

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Amosnz

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#1167671 3-Nov-2014 14:37

I haven't tried on Win8/8.1 but in Win7 during my last upgrade I left my SSD installed and swapped motherboard\cpu\ram from AMD to Intel and windows booted up, detected a bunch of new devices and told me to reboot. I ran a few driver updates after that and its been been going fine since.

I had created a vmdk of the drive first though (so I can load into virtualbox and access any data), and my intention was to re-install windows from scratch but when it booted without any errors I thought I'd give it a shot.

Speedtest

wasabi2k

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#1167755 3-Nov-2014 16:06

Windows 7 is pretty good - 8 is even better at handling the major hardware changes.

Unless you have a particularly exotic boot controller - and depends if you're using AHCI or IDE.

Back it up and give it a go.

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jnimmo

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#1167779 3-Nov-2014 16:44

Would be interested to see how you go. I haven't had any luck imaging or mucking around with Win 8 machines with UEFI. Probably OK if not using UEFI though. +1 for Macrium Reflect

1101

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#1168357 4-Nov-2014 11:48

Paragon have a free utility/CD for this, Ive used it & it worked on a HD swap to another differnet PC
Paragon boot repair ??

markoneswift

35 posts

Geek

#1168548 4-Nov-2014 15:05

Hey thanks for all the speedy replies and suggestions guys, very much appreciated. I've actually reconsidered my plan now and decided to beef up my sons existing rig a bit with a view to doing a major overhaul the next time PB have 'black friday' lol.

I looked at his machine in more depth and there are just too many caveats with it for me to be able to cope with the swap. His case would be too small for me to transplant my video card into, some of the USB ports don't work and I need quite a few usually plus some other niggles.

So may plan is overclock his FX-4100 CPU for now up to around 4.2Ghz, let him have my G Skill ram and I'll have his unbranded stuff, move his existing C drive to an SSD I have acquired and see how he goes. I checked his drivers for his 650 Ti last night and found they were a year out of date - I updated them and got a gain in WEI from 7.2 to 7.5 so happy with it ( and I know WEI is not a good benchmark, I just use it as an indication of improvements ).

Once again thanks for the input, cheers everyone :-)

Batman

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#1168563 4-Nov-2014 15:22

if you can boot, just "refresh your pc" - should be a one click process

markoneswift

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#1169008 5-Nov-2014 08:30

Yeah, I would agree with that it should just take a refresh if I decide to go down that route. As I said before, I've changed my plans now so we can consider this thread closed.

Cheers