Reinstalling windows on an ssd

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Q

Quasty

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Jan 4, 2014
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Hi guys,
Im going to get myself an ssd today and use my current hdd as a secondary drive. So my questions is: Will I have to like 'deactivate' windows on my current hdd before using the same product key on my new ssd???

Thanks
 
Solution
USAFRet


No. A clean reinstall (recommended), or migrate from old to new.
On the new drive, it may report as 'Not Activated'. In which case, try online activation. If that doesn't work, the phone robot, If that doesn't work, call and talk to a human.
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USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
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Mar 16, 2013
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No. A clean reinstall (recommended), or migrate from old to new.
On the new drive, it may report as 'Not Activated'. In which case, try online activation. If that doesn't work, the phone robot, If that doesn't work, call and talk to a human.
 
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Solution
T

ttjambe

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Sep 7, 2013
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Most SSD manufacturers make migration simple. Often times you can simply clone the OS onto the SSD and swap the drives. If you're on windows 8, UEFI bios stores the keys so there won't be any need to deactivate. Windows 7 and earlier may throw tantrums but whatever error code should be google fixable. If you plan on using an external caddy, you can keep the boot sector, but if you plan on having both drives internally connected, you may want to make sure only one of the storage media has a boot sector selected or else you may have to boot with boot manager every time. You can use the diskpart command in windows to clean the HDD. *Be warned, diskpart can and will delete entire disks if used improperly, read tutorials carefully and make sure the selected disk is the one you want to clean*.
You may run into issues with drivers and such. There are also alot of optimizations that windows 8 doesn't handle automatically. Google is your friend.
 
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R

Rookie_MIB

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Jul 27, 2013
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Clonzilla on a thumb drive is extremely useful - and great for transferring operating systems to an SSD. The only kicker is if you have a bigger original drive and a smaller SSD. Then you have to go about shrinking your windows partition down to a smaller size, but there are some tutorials out there on how to do that.

Good part: clonzilla does work well, means you don't have to reinstall windows.
Bad part: shrinking the partition.
 
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