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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Windows, FWIU in the majority of cases (and at least every time I did it) still does not support being moved to a new motherboard. Every time I upgrade a Windows PC's motherboard, the windows install becomes unbootable. Linux doesn't care.

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In support of your "Linux doesn't care.": It works so well that I stopped installing Linux on every new Thinkpad I buy but instead just switch my SSD on demand. Need mobility: put the disk into the X series. Want to work in the garden: put it into the T series with the outdoor display. Need to do graphics on the road: Put it into the T series with the higher resolution and the Radeon card.

Using Debian.

Not a (current) thinkpad user. What's the effort involved in swapping out the ssd?

I don't have the newest models, either. On my devices, there's an enclosure fixated with a philips screw. I removed the enclosures, so the SATA bay works essentially like a pc card slot for me.

It supports moving to a new motherboard if you don't forget to run sysprep first. If you don't or can't (hello new hardware because the old died!), you're basically SoL.

It would help if this wasn't the first time I'd ever heard of sysprep. Microsoft don't exactly go out of their way to advertise it. It doesn't even show up when searching from the start menu.

Searching online, the easiest results to find seem to be either to manually uninstall hardware-specific drivers in the device manager, or simply to assume that motherboard upgrades will just magically work. Whilst one can find results that mention sysprep, how is a user to know that the sysprep method is the right one?

And now I read:

When sysprepping an existing Windows setup, it only works if the Windows was installed clean and has never been upgraded or repaired using repair install.

So that's great.

Linux actually doesn't care at all. I used a laptop hard drive in a desktop which had a AMD processor instead of an Intel one (both have iGPUs) and it worked perfectly fine.

I put my hard-disk with Windows 10 installed for Gigabyte H61M motherboard(i3 3rd gen) to Asrock H91M S1 Plus(Pentium 4th gen) and it booted properly. It was slow for about half an hour(probably installing drivers in background) and then it worked fine afterwards.

Last year I diacovered I can remove the SSD from my Linux laptop while it is on and come back later and put it back in and it continues as if nothing's happened.

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