[Sumix]

I am building a budget PC for a friend and I was just wondering, if you completely clone a hard drive that has a copy of windows on it and put the cloned hard drive in the new computer will the copy of windows work as normal? Or will it ask you to enter a new product key? If anyone could help me it would be appreciated so I can possibly safe my friend $100 on getting a copy of windows.

PS: The OS on his old PC (the one I wanted to clone) is Windows 7 if that helps.

[w w w]

I've cloned my windows disk before and everything seemed to work just fine. You're going to need to uninstall and reinstall some drivers, of course though.

[NeverHere]

No. In most cases, Windows will detect different motherboard and will deactivate itself, forcing you to buy a new key. This may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to detect due to Windows refreshing experience index.

The only time I've ever heard of Windows keeping activation is when cloning hard drive that will be put back into the same system. For instance, old 500gb drive cloned onto a 2tb drive as an upgrade.

My advice to save some money- buy just the product key from Microsoft for ~$25 USD. Microsoft has direct links to clean Windows 7 images that can be burned onto a disk or USB. They just need to be activated.

[legendaryfiles]

Ask your friend to run his old PC and use advanced token manager(google it) to backup the keys and certificate.
In this way if you reinstall the OS in new PC you can simply use the backup to restore the license without any problem.

http://www.howtogeek.com/75496/how-to-re...eactivate/

[Xycon]

No. In most cases, Windows will detect different motherboard and will deactivate itself, forcing you to buy a new key. This may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to detect due to Windows refreshing experience index.

The only time I've ever heard of Windows keeping activation is when cloning hard drive that will be put back into the same system. For instance, old 500gb drive cloned onto a 2tb drive as an upgrade.

My advice to save some money- buy just the product key from Microsoft for ~$25 USD. Microsoft has direct links to clean Windows 7 images that can be burned onto a disk or USB. They just need to be activated.

This.
Not to mention such a transfer between 2 completely different systems will BSOD the fuck out of everything due to drivers.

[Sumix]

Thanks for all the help guys!

It is most appreciated.

[kh3ir0n]

This.
Not to mention such a transfer between 2 completely different systems will BSOD the fuck out of everything due to drivers.

Absolutely true, unless you uninstall video and audio drivers before cloning, it helps a lot when restoring an image to dissimilar hardware. Or you can use Acronis True Image with Acronis Universal Boot, it will promt you for the proper drivers before finishing the cloning process. This has saved my ass a few times.

[Breeze26509]

Why not just download a legal .iso and buy a key from someone?

[mrnapolean1]

I am building a budget PC for a friend and I was just wondering, if you completely clone a hard drive that has a copy of windows on it and put the cloned hard drive in the new computer will the copy of windows work as normal? Or will it ask you to enter a new product key? If anyone could help me it would be appreciated so I can possibly safe my friend $100 on getting a copy of windows.

PS: The OS on his old PC (the one I wanted to clone) is Windows 7 if that helps.

It will depend on how much different the hardware is in the new PC compared to the old one.

Its really hit or miss on somthing like this. Ive done it mutipile times swapping C:\ Drives from one PC to another and had Windows boot up successfully and Ive had them give me the most infamous 7b (STOP: 0x0000007B) bluescreen.

If you clone this and get this above mentioned stop screen/BSOD, Plan on doing a reformat and reinstall of Windows.