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In his blog, Scott Adams describes his exasperating experience following a change of motherboards. Central to the story is the fact that he has two phone numbers for Windows re-activation, both of which claim they are an official Microsoft call center and that the other is a scam. Neither are any help anyway. Seems to be a topical issue right now.
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Windows Meets New Motherboard - Scott Adams' Experience
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday December 22 2014, @04:11PM
Good luck with that. I tried moving the Windows 7 install of a Lenovo Thinkpad to an SSD I upgraded it with. I used a combination of DD and ntfsclone to copy the partitions but no dice. There are three partitions: boot, restore and windows. Boot has a boot manager which I assume also contains diagnostic utilities and the restore loader. I made sure everything matched up: partition size, starting sectors, sector count etc. My goal was to start the restore partition to do a clean windows install to a new partition on the SSD. The damn thing refused to boot at all, even the diagnostics. I am sure I could have poked around the boot loader partition and fixed it but screw that noise. Who wants all that complexity?
I installed Linux on the SSD, the proper way to fix Windows boot issues 😉. I wound up using that Windows license for a VM on the same system. A much better setup overall. The spinning disk was backed up and turned into a mobile USB disk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:44AM
That's not how you move a Windows install. You should have created a factory restore disk. The leaflets that came with your computer and Windows initially recommends that you do this. Windows is not Linux. You don't move Windows around like you move Linux around and you don't move Linux around like you move Windows around. Don't blame the OS when you don't know how to use it.
I made sure everything matched up: partition size, starting sectors, sector count etc.
Then you also used DD incorrectly. You want to copy the entire drive, not each partition individually. You didn't need to look at any of those. You also switched disk architectures: HDD -> SSD. At the lower levels HDDs and SSDs are completely different. You shouldn't use a low level copy tool to transfer data between the two.
I hope you don't consider yourself to be a computer expert (for Windows or Linux). You seem to know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to actually know that.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 23 2014, @05:50PM
You obviously have never done this yourself. And you don't have to be a dick about it.
I have many, many times moved standard Windows installs from both large to smaller disks and smaller to larger disks using Linux tools such as ntfsclone, dd and gparted. I have even converted physical Windows installs to virtual machines (Both XP and vista). So yes, I do know what I am doing. The problem with Lenovo is they have a boot partition which loads Windows instead of Windows using its own boot loader. Their restore disk would put this same crap configuration back on disk. I do not want a diagnostic/boot partition nor do I want a restore partition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:46PM
You're right, I didn't need the personal attack. Sorry about that.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday December 24 2014, @05:57PM
No problem.