Swapping SSD from an HP laptop to a Dell

Stoly

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So a friend of mine's hp laptop just died, he wants to swap the SSD from it to a Dell. The HP is intel and the Dell is AMD, but that's not the problem.

The thing is I assume secure boot won't make it easy (possible?), what should I do for it to work?

To clarify, the idea is to use the hp windows install on the dell. Not reinstalling.
 
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I've not tried it in many years, probably since WIndows XP. There, you sometimes had to jigger with the MBR, but you could at least get Windows to try to boot. Then you'd get all the mismatched drivers. It was almost universally better to just reinstall cleanly.

With Win11, I assume the UEFI TPM thing would throw fits - but honestly don't know if it will or not. And then there's the Windows Activation, which on factory keys, is usually stored in the UEFI... so you'll get an Activation error (that's relatively minor and livable, but just sayin')

And then, there's the fact that often factory drives will have a hidden recovery partition, and they will ~sometimes~ look for the specific hardware config.
 
Only problem I can think of is if Bitlocker is enabled and the TPM is needed for decryption of the drive. That's about it.

Like Brian said though, you're better off just reinstalling the OS since the underlying arch of the laptops are drastically different.
 
I would never take a windows install from computer 1 and expect it to just work on computer 2 unless it's built with a sysprep to wipe out driver stuff and redo it. Otherwise you're going to have a bevy of issues and never be 100% sure everything is exactly right...

I mean unless your friend enjoys living his life in device manager and researching what components/devices exist on their NEW laptop as opposed to the old one to wipe out all of the 'attention' and 'warning' and 'questionmark' devices.
 
Brian_B said:
I've not tried it in many years, probably since WIndows XP. There, you sometimes had to jigger with the MBR, but you could at least get Windows to try to boot. Then you'd get all the mismatched drivers. It was almost universally better to just reinstall cleanly.

With Win11, I assume the UEFI TPM thing would throw fits - but honestly don't know if it will or not. And then there's the Windows Activation, which on factory keys, is usually stored in the UEFI... so you'll get an Activation error (that's relatively minor and livable, but just sayin')

And then, there's the fact that often factory drives will have a hidden recovery partition, and they will ~sometimes~ look for the specific hardware config.
Click to expand...

I disabled secureboot, the SSD gets recognized in the bios as a boot device, but it won't boot, like it didn't have a boot partition.

Re-enabled sucureboot, put back the original HDD and it didn't boot either, but I was able to select a boot partition.

I don't think the SSD had bitlocker enabled as it was an upgrade from a HDD.
 
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Grimlakin said:
I would never take a windows install from computer 1 and expect it to just work on computer 2 unless it's built with a sysprep to wipe out driver stuff and redo it. Otherwise you're going to have a bevy of issues and never be 100% sure everything is exactly right...

I mean unless your friend enjoys living his life in device manager and researching what components/devices exist on their NEW laptop as opposed to the old one to wipe out all of the 'attention' and 'warning' and 'questionmark' devices.
Click to expand...
Actually, I've done this dozens of times even between intel and AMD, mostly on desktops, ever since windows 7, windows 10 has been much more forgiving with drivers specially storage drivers. Only time I had trouble was when using RAID.

Doing it in windows XP even with sysprep was a hit or miss.
 
I think you need to run the Repair option in Windows Recovery to reset the UEFI boot partition, since MBRs aren't really used any longer.
 
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