I've never had much luck moving a windows installation to a new motherboard, even when uninstalling drivers and using sysprep. is it really a new computer or an upgrade? If I replace the mobo and CPU but keep everything else including the case, HDD, GPU, DVD, etc. Since you have a SATA HDD, you may have to load the SATA drivers on a floppy and hit 'F6' when Windows setup starts, to load the SATA drivers and recognize the drive.
Sysprep when change motherboard install#
I didn't try to speak to anyone but I figured redleader's experience was what was ahead of me, so it seemed faster just to do the fresh install of 7 and jump to 10.Ĭan't you just say that the X component broke and you replaced it (video card, hard drive etc.?) rather than admitting it's a new PC? It's technically the same "computer".What's constitutes a "computer" anyway? It's just a collection of components that can be individually replaced. (Or at least as long as you dont change out the motherboard, as the digital license is directly tied to that piece of hardware.) I have been told that if a machine came with Windows 10 Home, and you at some point upgraded to Pro, that a completely clean reinstall will go back to Home, but Ive never had to do this so have never witnessed that. From dealing with customers with dead motherboards (and not having the same motherboard they had), I found this method to work. I tried to reactivate through their system and also tried providing the Windows 7 key that the machine was upgraded from. Yeah, if you obtained Windows 10 through the free upgrade, it will not activate on the new hardware. When I tried this with a Windows 10 free upgrade, Windows 10 deactivated because of the hardware change, and I spent hours on the phone with Microsoft support trying to explain what I was doing to people who spoke broken english and did not understand what a hard drive was.
Sysprep when change motherboard how to#
However, in the next section, we will show you how to install a new version of Windows 10 on your computer if you’re replacing your OEM motherboard with something different. I want to plug in my existing SSD's into a machine with a new mobo and processor and have Windows work. Simply put, when doing a changing motherboard Windows 10 procedure, you can reactivate it without having to do anything else.