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Given that I have an old pc with win7 installed and a brandnew pc (of course hard drive is blank). i would like to migrate win7 from old hd to new one so I prepare these:

  1. A win7 ghost image file from my old pc and store it to my external hd.(this is multiple motherboard version)
  2. I made a bootable ghost usb.

Now is it possible to restore this ghost image file into the new hd of my new pc so that this new pc will run win7 without fresh OS installation on this new PC?

If yes, please show me how. Thanks

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Possible: Yes.

Legal: It depends on the OS you are using (sometimes it is tied to the old PC. E.g. Dell specific windows 7 OS which you can try to move to a new non-Dell system can work, but will probably not activate.)

Will it work: Sometimes. The hardware will differ and windows customises itself to the hardware. If it is close enough that it still boots then it probably works. If you have a different disk system (e.g. old PC uses IDE, new setup uses SAS) then it will not work.

In all cases removing as many drivers as possible might help. The perfect tool for this is sysprep.

If yes, please show me how. Thanks

Please search the site. it has been answered before.

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    If you read the process many users go through to prepare their environment for different hardware, you’ll find many consider Sysprep to be the definitive step for cleaning out incompatible drivers. I strongly recommend that before you make the transition (assuming you are licensed to do so) that you manually uninstall your drivers from Programs and Features before Syspreping. The issue is that many drivers have applications that install with them for managing the device functions (like graphics control suite software) and Sysprep doesn’t always remove these applications.
    – WinOutreach2
    Sep 16, 2015 at 18:31

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