Want to change hardrives In laptop

[Cheftrain]

Hi all just a quick one looking to upgrade to a ssd hard drive in my laptop can I copy over from the old hard drive once the new drive is in or will I need to deactivate and reinstall ?

[96RAF]

I have upgraded two of my PCs to SSD and as I used cloning software, which makes an exact copy of every single bit of information from your old disk to the new one the PC and programs do not even know you have done it so no deactivation-reactivation is necessary.

It would be different if you were doing a clean install as then you would also have to reload all your apps which would require going through the faff.

Just be aware some cloning packages are better than others, so if one fails to mount the new SSD such that it is recognised as bootable try one of those in the top ten free list - the package recommended by my SSD supplier was useless and I used this freebie...

[P-Henny]

As 96RAF says. Will only work if the SSD is a clone of the HDD. If you do a clean Windows and application install, then you will have to follow the deactivation / reactivation procedure. Like 96RAF I too have done an SSD clone upgrade without issue.

Just for clarity, you cannot just do a basic file copy from one drive to another as you seem to be suggesting. Not only will RM not recognise it, the Windows OS will almost certainly fail as well. There are so many hidden system files that only cloning software will capture and copy over.

[RDS]

As long as you still have access to the old SSD, the safest way by far is to de-activate and then re-activate on the new SSD.

[Cheftrain]

Hi all thanks for advice, I’ll speak to the guy doing the work on the laptop and see what he says 😊