Using Acronis to install and existing Win 10 config on a new platform and adding a new Win key
Hello,
Among our various machines we have a very old and very stout Dell tower running Win 10 Pro that I have locked at feature level 2004. The machine has been noble, but it really no longer has sufficient horsepower to do what it needs to do in serving info to other machines on the network. It has a ton of legacy software on it, much of which cannot be cold installed today because of various updates no longer available on vendor servers.
I wish to move the entire existing software suite, OS and apps to a new platform. I regularly do full disk Acronis 2016 backups, and about 12 backups of various individual parts of the software configuration.
I would like to know if this might be possible:
1. Backup the old Dell to tib
2. Bring in a new, faster, bigger system
3. Restore the tib to the new platform, bringing along Win 10 locked at feature 2004
4. On the new system change the Win 10 pro key to a new and valid key
5. Continue operations on the new system without being forced beyond Win 10 feature level 2004
Do you have any idea if this can work?
FYI - we have 12 machines, all running various auto scheduled and on-demand Acronis backups and behaving flawlessly. We've used Acronis for BU for more than 25 years.
Thank you in advance.
David
Hi Steve,
Thank you for the exceptionally quick response and for the wonderfully complete explanation.
I will be migrating from a Win 10 Pro PC with USB keyboard and mouse and SATA III drives to a bigger, faster platform that will also have USB keyboard and mouse and some other SATA III drives and an increase in RAM from 8G to 16 or 32. After reading a number of your attachments, I'm thinking that possibly a simple Acronis True Image restore might get the target to boot and that it would heal itself afterwards.
And if that didn't work that using the Universal Restore capability is very likely to get things running. I would think the only only matter would be having a Win key that was valid for the new installation.
Am I following you correctly?
Thank you.
David
David, AUR has been less needed since Windows 10 was introduced due to its much improved handling of hardware changes. The exceptions are when there specific new devices for which Windows would not normally provide drivers and those drivers are needed to boot correctly.
For the Windows key it is worth seeing if you can move your existing license from the old PC to the new one, assuming you are discontinuing using the old one! Otherwise then you will need to obtain new license(s).
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