This is not about moving a site. It’s about moving my dev. environment to a new computer.
I have Windows 10 OEM on a machine that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. Since Windows 10 is dying, I have to move.
I have an extremely complex setup with PhpStorm, Git, Composer, Codeception, Xdebug, XAMPP, PHP, MariaDB, PhpUnit, etc… I also have an equally complicated system for writing books (like the second edition of my MODX book). I think copying everything over with PCMover or the equivalent is bound to fail.
I’d like to just move my main drive to the new machine, then upgrade it to Windows 11 Retail, but Windows 10 OEM won’t work on a new machine, so it’s almost certain that my disk won’t boot in the new machine. I have no problem buying a new copy of Windows 11, Retail, but I can’t install it on my current machine.
I’m hoping that someone here has done something similar and can suggest a migration strategy. I can think of at least a half-dozen different ways to do it, but have no idea which ones might work.
Hey Bob,
That sounds like a bit of a head scratcher.
Depending on how old your current PC is - it’s actually relatively simple to upgrade to W11 while bypassing the hardware checks. Download your installer, burn it to USB using Rufus, selecting the options to remove W11 hardware checks.
So, perhaps you could do something like this:
- upgrade from Windows 10 OEM to Windows 11 OEM [using Rufus] [this process should be free]
- change your product key to a retail W11 key in Control Panel
From there - maybe you’d be in a better position to make the move to a new machine?
Directly moving the drive to a new machine after this process is risky but in my experience often works after a bit of wrestling with drivers etc - I’d strongly recommend cloning the disk rather than trying it with your existing O/S disk.
Alternatively - if you have both machines on W11 retail - you could backup / restore from old to new.
Lots of variables in this - and obviously not tested!
Thanks! It’s an interesting solution. I know that when you install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, they put a watermark in the registry and maybe something else to mark it as not legit. I’m a little afraid that if they mark it in a way the Rufus doesn’t know about, it might cause problems on the new machine.
I think my first attempt will be to update the product key to retail Windows 11 on the old machine and activate it. (I’ve read that 10 and 11 use the same keys.) Then move a clone of the drive to the new machine and see if I can get it to boot. I’ve downloaded all the NUC drivers and they will be on the drive. If I boot to safe mode and update the drivers successfully, I should have Windows 10 retail on the new machine, and I can then upgrade to Windows 11 (or not – apparently, you can keep getting all the updates to Windows 10 for $30/year). I hate Windows 11, so I may just do that.
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