0

I'm getting a warranty replacement for my Windows 10 pro laptop with a screen hardware issue. I would like to just clone my hard drive onto an external drive and then transfer it to the new computer. This is my work computer and I use it every day. While I am ready to spend the time doing the transfer myself, I can't give up the computer to let the retailer do it for me. I have kept up with all the upgrades on Windows 10 except for the Spring 2019 upgrade which I have delayed for 45 days.

My computer has a 500 GB SSD that is about 2/3rds full. Can I use something like Acronis True Image to copy all the sectors or do I need to be concerned that I will be overwriting the operating system that will come on the replacement laptop? I don't know how Microsoft will deal with registering my current copy of Windows on the new computer or whether I also need to be concerned about something else.

Any help is appreciated.

Improve this question
4
  • Do you have an opportunity to just swap the drives? There isn’t anything special about this. If it is the same hardware you can just backup an image of the complete drive and restore it to the new drive from a boot disk/usb.
    – Appleoddity
    Apr 18, 2019 at 21:45
  • It's a Microsoft Surface Book. It is apparently glued together like a phone. Probably if I opened it up, they would not accept it as a warranty return. Besides, the one I am returning has a 500 GB SSD and the replacement will have a 1 TB (additional cost) SSD.
    – jrodenhi
    Apr 19, 2019 at 20:13
  • You can use Acronis if you want. There is also macrium reflect. Create a full disk image to a file on the external backup drive. You do not need to do a “sector by sector” backup. Just make sure you backup ALL partitions. Next, create a bootable Acronis or macrium recovery USB and boot the drive to restore the backup file you created but also enlarge the OS partition so it takes the larger space available to you. If the hardware is the same there isn’t much else to do. Windows should reactivate with a new license on the new hardware.
    – Appleoddity
    Apr 19, 2019 at 20:17
  • Thank you. I did an online chat with a person from Acronis. He said basically the same thing you did but in more detail using their program Disk Director 12. This is something I don't want to get wrong so I appreciate your help.
    – jrodenhi
    Apr 23, 2019 at 14:42

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .