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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

Resize and clone the install from the HDD to the SSD. I've had the same "install" of Windows since 2011, its gone through 3 different storage mediums, two different motherboards, and three different CPUs.

My go-to for a low level copy between two different drives is Clonezilla.

https://clonezilla.org/

GParted is also another live OS with good tools to manage partitions.

https://gparted.org/

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Does windows handle it alright when the hardware (motherboard/cpu) it's running on changes out from under it?

It won't break. Activation may or may not whine at you, and if it does whine it might resolve itself after a couple days.

When I've done this, on first boot Windows detects the changed hardware and there's a little mini-installation screen that says "Reconfiguring Hardware" or something. Things seem to work afterwards. Changing the Motherboard may cause activation issues on OEM licenses. Changing from Nvidia GPUs to other manufacturers may require e.g. DDU to remove their drivers completely.

On the PC I described above I have added and removed several additional hard drives over the years as I expand and they die. Recently I had my old Nvidia graphics card die and replaced it with an ATI.

I uninstalled the nvidia drivers then installed the ATI ones and it seems to work fine. No activation complaints.

It's actually been very easy to keep this thing running. Pretty much just plug in new parts when old ones fail. I think my spinning rust HDD is about to die though so I should take the suggestions in this thread and go through the process of moving the OS to the SSD.

At some point in the distant past I might have replaced a Core 2 Duo for a Core 2 Quad. Or I may have built it this way, not sure.

Yes, first "deinstall" HAL, then reboot.

Then deinstall all your cpu's (if the number of cores changed), thats no joke...deinstall your cpu's (all of them), then reboot.

Update all the drivers...that's it.

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