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Is the "system repair disc" created via "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" good for that PC only, or is it interchangeable between any PCs running Windows 10?

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    Umm... What good is a Windows 7 repair disc on a system running Windows 10? Windows 7/8 use an OEM version of the OS for specific PC's, in most cases any Dell Windows 7/8 disc can be used on any Dell PC that originally had that version of Windows. Windows 10 is a similar but more generic, you can use the OEM version from that hardware or the Microsoft version to restore it. A "repair disk" is actually different and you can't reinstall from it to as different machine, depending on the specific issue.
    – acejavelin
    Aug 5, 2018 at 15:38
  • @acejavelin, see "answer" below. Windows 10 dialog for "Backup and restore (Windows 7)" Aug 5, 2018 at 18:34
  • Win7 repair disc is only good for W7 systems.
    – Moab
    Aug 6, 2018 at 19:41

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There are different types of backups that may be made from the Backup and Restore (Windows 7) dialog in Windows 10. (Yes, it does seem an odd title for v. 10 - it's a hint, perhaps, that this is deprecated?)

  • Backup or restore your files: This saves your personal data, but not operating system (OS) files. These files can be restored to another machine, assuming they're not encrypted.

  • Create a system repair disc: This makes an image of OS files, but not data. These images are probably not portable. During the original installation, drivers specific to that PC were downloaded and installed. It is possible that identical make and model machines with identical OS would have the same drivers, but manufacturers change hardware during production runs of a model, so that is not certain.

Another issue is that Microsoft identifies a PC by its hardware (including things such as HDD and CPU serial numbers), as well as license key. Restoring on different hardware might later require authentication, if license information was lost.

Backup and Restore dlg

So it might be worth a try, if you don't have a recent disk image, e.g. that made by third-party tools such as Macrium Reflect and alternatives. If it fails, there are other options.

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