Going from Intel to AMD without reinstalling Windows 10

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criccio

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Mar 26, 2008
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It was incredible how easy and seamless that was. Went from a 4690k system (pushing 5 years old) to a new R7 2700X.

I uninstalled anything in Windows with Intel in the name minus my one Intel SSD's software and shut down. Did the swap and booted back up. While it took a little longer and at the BIOS I get a message saying it was getting my devices ready, after about 2 minutes I saw my login screen like nothing ever changed. I installed the AMD chipset drivers and all is well.

Its been 24 hours now and not a single hiccup.

I wonder if that would have been possible in the Windows XP days.
 
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I just did a board, chip and ram change from an old ass c2d to an less old ass fx4130, works fine and reactivated no prob.
 
I think since its tied to your microsoft account now, it's not a big deal to transfer it to new systems.
 
AltTabbins said:
I think since its tied to your microsoft account now, it's not a big deal to transfer it to new systems.
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the license transfer is not biggie its the complete hardware change and no issues that impressed me.
 
Swapping hardware hasn't been an issue at least since the Windows 7 days. You should have no problems at all going forward.
 
Meeho said:
Swapping hardware hasn't been an issue at least since the Windows 7 days. You should have no problems at all going forward.
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Windows 7 was considerably worse than Windows 10 at sorting out drivers on a clean install, in this regard Windows 10 is actually quite good. Therefore I'd have to say that it's a fairly bold claim to say that swapping installs between machines hasn't been an issue since Windows 7.

B00nie said:
I wouldn't be surprised if they would force push the old drivers to the system... :)
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You win some, you loose some! ;)
 
Mazzspeed said:
Windows 7 was considerably worse than Windows 10 at sorting out drivers on a clean install, in this regard Windows 10 is actually quite good. Therefore I'd have to say that it's a fairly bold claim to say that swapping installs between machines hasn't been an issue since Windows 7.
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I don't know what you mean by sorting out drivers, but there is nothing in Win 7 that would prevent a seamless transition between builds. Deinstall vendor specific drivers and apps, swap hardware, install missing drivers and you're done.
 
Meeho said:
I don't know what you mean by sorting out drivers, but there is nothing in Win 7 that would prevent a seamless transition between builds. Deinstall vendor specific drivers and apps, swap hardware, install missing drivers and you're done.
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You don't know what I mean?

Do you install both operating systems often?! The thing with swapping a Windows 10 HDD between builds is that you don't need to uninstall anything in most cases, you just swap the drive. Do that under Windows 7 and in nine out of ten cases the result is a blue screen and boot loop.
 
Mazzspeed said:
You don't know what I mean?

Do you install both operating systems often?! The thing with swapping a Windows 10 HDD between builds is that you don't need to uninstall anything in most cases, you just swap the drive. Do that under Windows 7 and in nine out of ten cases the result is a blue screen and boot loop.
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Oh, no, one has to make two clicks before the swap! What a POS Win 7 is!
 
Meeho said:
Oh, no, one has to make two clicks before the swap! What a POS Win 7 is!
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I don't know what planet you're on, but two clicks my arse.

Windows 7 is downright hopeless at automatically locating and downloading correct drivers on install, it's not at all uncommon to have to find correct drivers using hardware ID's. It's not often I outright praise Windows 10, but this is one area where Windows 10 kicks the crap out of Windows 7.
 
criccio said:
It was incredible how easy and seamless that was. Went from a 4690k system (pushing 5 years old) to a new R7 2700X.

I uninstalled anything in Windows with Intel in the name minus my one Intel SSD's software and shut down. Did the swap and booted back up. While it took a little longer and at the BIOS I get a message saying it was getting my devices ready, after about 2 minutes I saw my login screen like nothing ever changed. I installed the AMD chipset drivers and all is well.

Its been 24 hours now and not a single hiccup.

I wonder if that would have been possible in the Windows XP days.
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Back in the XP days it would usually work if you ran Sysprep first. XP didn't like swapping out motherboards on the fly.
Windows 7 had no issues swapping between hardware, Intel or AMD. you just had to remember if you had your install in IDE mode and change the BIOS to IDE since newer hardware defaults to AHCI, otherwise it would blue screen during boot.

The 2 main rigs in my sig had Windows installed back in 2009 and have been through many hardware changes over the years without any real issues.
Only issue that happened was during the upgrade from Win 7 to 10 on my 3770k setup and windows 10 disabling every USB port on my system.
Found out it was one of the Asus AI Suite programs, Ai Charger, that wasn't compatible with 10. Instead of saying something during the upgrade, it upgraded then disabled every USB port, had to remote into the machine to revert back to 7.
 
Mazzspeed said:
You don't know what I mean?

Do you install both operating systems often?! The thing with swapping a Windows 10 HDD between builds is that you don't need to uninstall anything in most cases, you just swap the drive. Do that under Windows 7 and in nine out of ten cases the result is a blue screen and boot loop.
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That was mainly due to IDE and AHCI mismatch.

I've swapped hardware on windows 7 more than 100 times, can't recall having an issue, other than the IDE AHCI setting.
 
The argument here isn't whether it's possible to transfer an existing Windows 7 install between machines, the argument is that Windows 10 handles it better and easier than Windows 7 with less user intervention.

Take a five year old laptop for example. In many cases things like fingerprint readers, CF card readers and even WiFi cards are not correctly identified under Windows 7, to make matters worse it's not uncommon for hardware vendors to change regarding such items part way through the run of a particular make and model and many laptop manufacturers are absolutely hopeless when it comes to driver support. In this case under Windows 7 it is necessary to use hardware ID's to manually locate the correct drivers for the device, under Windows 10 however the OS has absolutely no problem identifying the hardware and downloading/installing the drivers itself with no user intervention whatsoever.

In the past, the only OS that handled swapping installs seamlessly between hardware was Linux, now Windows 10 gets pretty close at being just as good as Linux. AHCI is still an issue even under Windows 10, booting into safe mode rectifies that.

I've swapped Windows XP installs using the same process outlined by some here under Windows 7 between hardware, I'd never go as far as to claim that the process was as straightforward as it is under Windows 10.
 
I err on the side of caution on all my personal systems. I don't have any software that is overly complicated to re-install and I've reloaded Windows 10 enough times to have all my drivers/software at the ready before hand. So a reload after an architecture upgrade is no biggie to me. I've dealt with my fair share of issues with no reloading the OS years ago. Don't honestly care if Windows 10 is much improved in that regard, just not worth my time to deal with any issues.
 
ir0nw0lf said:
I err on the side of caution on all my personal systems. I don't have any software that is overly complicated to re-install and I've reloaded Windows 10 enough times to have all my drivers/software at the ready before hand. So a reload after an architecture upgrade is no biggie to me. I've dealt with my fair share of issues with no reloading the OS years ago. Don't honestly care if Windows 10 is much improved in that regard, just not worth my time to deal with any issues.
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So, you automatically waste the time to reinstall vs a couple of minutes for Windows to reconfigure itself? If shit doesn't work, then reinstall.
 
Mazzspeed said:
I don't know what planet you're on, but two clicks my arse.

Windows 7 is downright hopeless at automatically locating and downloading correct drivers on install, it's not at all uncommon to have to find correct drivers using hardware ID's. It's not often I outright praise Windows 10, but this is one area where Windows 10 kicks the crap out of Windows 7.
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I'm on the planet of staying on topic and not introducing unrelated arguments when my main one got refuted. This was about the OS'es ability to survive significant hardware swaps, not automatic driver installation.
 
I'd say Windows 10 is much better than prior releases. My mining rigs are a mix of different Intel/AMD hardware with a mix of video video cards, and with how easy Windows 10 has been I've been able to have a single base image and load or re-image all my random machines with the same base image. Hardware ranges from AMD Athlon II X2 to Intel i3 7100 and almost no commonality with motherboards.
 
Zepher said:
So, you automatically waste the time to reinstall vs a couple of minutes for Windows to reconfigure itself? If shit doesn't work, then reinstall.
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Considering this happens maybe once a year or other year, yes. And as for it being a waste of time, that's purely opinion. :D
 
Meeho said:
I'm on the planet of staying on topic and not introducing unrelated arguments when my main one got refuted. This was about the OS'es ability to survive significant hardware swaps, not automatic driver installation.
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There isn't anything related to my discussion that isn't on topic.

You claimed that transferring an install between platforms hasn't been an issue since the Windows 7 days, I'm claiming that isn't really the case and it's a situation Windows 10 definitely handles better than Windows 7. The procedure you believe is so straightforward has been possible since the Windows XP days. Not too sure just what you think has been refuted here? However I do find it quite odd how defensive you are over someone challenging your opinion.
 
Mazzspeed said:
There isn't anything related to my discussion that isn't on topic.

You claimed that transferring an install between platforms hasn't been an issue since the Windows 7 days, I'm claiming that isn't really the case and it's a situation Windows 10 definitely handles better than Windows 7. The procedure you believe is so straightforward has been possible since the Windows XP days. Not too sure just what you think has been refuted here? However I do find it quite odd how defensive you are over someone challenging your opinion.
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We're talking about swapping the hardware and the OS booting up. XP would hardly ever boot when swapping hardware without running sysprep first, which you sometimes couldn't do if the motherboard failed.
We're not discussing whether MS has all of the drivers for all of your hardware.
 
my test bench was intel system i went to test a new AMD build and i took the win10 on the ssd from the intel and put it on the AMD and it booted right up no issues...
 
bit of a necro but ill chime in. the install below has now gone from that to a fx8120 that died and i went down to a fx4120 for a while then back up to a fx8350 and now onto my sig rig. license didnt even bat an eye. i know that its all amd but that a lot of change, i think.
pendragon1 said:
I just did a board, chip and ram change from an old ass c2d to an less old ass fx4130, works fine and reactivated no prob.
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pendragon1 said:
bit of a necro but ill chime in. the install below has now gone from that to a fx8120 that died and i went down to a fx4120 for a while then back up to a fx8350 and now onto my sig rig. license didnt even bat an eye. i know that its all amd but that a lot of change, i think.
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I'm sure your OS was just happy going from an FX to a Ryzen.
 
I just recently built my friend a Ryen 3900X setup and he didn't want a clean install due to all the programs and settings he uses for his work, and he didn't really want to spend half a day or so to setup the new machine since he is so busy.
He was running Windows 7 on his i7 4770 setup and I did an upgrade on that to Windows 10 which went smooth.
After that I cloned his install to an SSD for me to work with on his new machine.

Went home with the clone, cloned that clone to his new M.2 drive, installed the M.2 and the machine would constantly blue screen during boot up. Repair didn't work, safe mode didn't work.
Just for shits and giggles, I cloned my 4790k install to his M.2 and it booted fine and proceeded to automatically install the hardware drivers.
So after getting my install to boot on his 3900X, I went ahead and just tossed his cloned SSD into my machine which booted up fine and found all the drivers, I then cloned that drive to the M.2
and popped it into his 3900X and it booted up and started installing the device drivers and then finally was at a working Windows 10 desktop with nearly all his apps and settings intact, a couple of apps just needed to be re-activated.

I can't remember if Windows activated automatically with the new hardware or if I had to put in the Windows 7 key again.
 
I just went from a 9700k to a 3900x and it was mostly smooth. I think I may not have my boot SSD set to GPT, so I had to turn on CSM in the BIOS, but that's a problem for another day. lol I had to put my Win 10 key in again, but it activated with no problems once I did that.
 
More of an issue with swapping GPUs with Win10 than anythng else in the system, really GPU swap is the only issue. Not for activation, but driver corruption.
 
Mazzspeed said:
I don't know what planet you're on, but two clicks my arse.

Windows 7 is downright hopeless at automatically locating and downloading correct drivers on install, it's not at all uncommon to have to find correct drivers using hardware ID's. It's not often I outright praise Windows 10, but this is one area where Windows 10 kicks the crap out of Windows 7.
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I still have to look up hardware IDs in Windows 10, not sure I agree it changed much. I've done MB swaps more than once under windows 7 and 10, both acted very similar. That said, I prefer to just wipe the drive and start fresh anyways, just backup files and go. This way I know there aren't traces of crap all over like M$ and other vendors like to do. Anyways, congrats on the simple swap, probably saved you a good amount of reinstalling.
 
I did this recently when I upgraded my main system from a 5820k to a 3900X. I was actually pretty amazed how well it worked... at first.

I started to notice all sorts of weird quirks here and there. Drivers for some devices not wanting to install correctly, while other drivers installed fine. Tons of random errors in the event log. Quirky issues trying to get the computer to come out of sleep correctly. Stuff like that. Finally did a fresh install, and boom, all quirks gone, everything works perfect.
 
GotNoRice said:
I did this recently when I upgraded my main system from a 5820k to a 3900X. I was actually pretty amazed how well it worked... at first.

I started to notice all sorts of weird quirks here and there. Drivers for some devices not wanting to install correctly, while other drivers installed fine. Tons of random errors in the event log. Quirky issues trying to get the computer to come out of sleep correctly. Stuff like that. Finally did a fresh install, and boom, all quirks gone, everything works perfect.
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This and the old drivers and files stick around. They don't just uninstall when Windows 10 sees you have a new chipset.
 
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