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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

A Linux install is often remarkably hardware agnostic.

Windows would panic, certainly (because so much drivers & other state is persisted & expected), but the Linux kernel when it boots kind of figures out afresh what the world is every time. That's fine.

The main thing you ought to do is generate a new systemd/dbus machine-id. But past this, I fairly frequently instantiate new systems by taking a btrfs snapshot of my current machine & send that snapshot over to a new drive. Chroot onto that drive, and use bootctl to install systemd-boot, and then I have a second Linux is ready to go.

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Unless you're doing a BIG jump, like from legacy to UEFI, or SATA to NVMe, Windows will generally just figure it out.

There may be an occasional exception for when you've doing something weird (iirc the 11th-13th gen Intel RST need a slipstreamed or manually added drivers unless you change controller settings in the BIOS which may bite on laptops at the moment if you're unaware of having to do it).

But even for big jumps you can usually get it working with a bit of hackery pokery. Most recently I had to jump from a legacy C2Q system running Windows 10 to run bare metal on a 9th gen Core i3.

I ended up putting it onto a VM to run the upgrade from legacy to UEFI so I'd have something that'd actually boot on this annoyingly picky 9th gen i3 Dell system, but it worked.

I generally (ab)use Macrium Reflect, and have a copy of Parted Magic to hand, but it's extremely rare for me to find a machine I can't clone to dissimilar hardware.

The only one that stumped me recently was an XP machine running specific legacy software from a guy who died two decades ago. That I had to P2V. Worked though!

My old practice used to be to start safe mode & go delete as many devices drivers as I could. That got me pretty far.

These days though I've had a number of cases where some very humble small scoped bios change will cause windows to not boot. I've run into this quite a few times, and it's been quite an aggravation to me. I've been trying to get my desktops power consumption down & get sleep working, mostly in Linux, but its shocking to me what a roll-of-the-die it's been that I may have to do the windows-self-reinstall, from changing an AMD cool-n-quiet settings or adjusting a sleep mode option.

You can "make" windows do a lot of things. As a consumer oriented product you shouldn't have to.

You don't if you move from one relatively modern machine to another. My current laptop SATA SSD has moved between... 4 different machines, I think? I'll have to "make" when I move to an NVMe SSD, maybe, but it might largely just work. Time may tell.

If you do things the Microsoft way, you just sign into your MS account and your files show up via OneDrive, your apps and games come from the Microsoft store anyway.

There's plenty to fault Microsoft for. Like making it progressively more difficult to just use local accounts.

I don't think "cloning a machine from hardware a decade old onto a brand new laptop may require expertise" is one of them.

> If you do things the Microsoft way

and happen to live near good bandwidth.

> Like making it progressively more difficult to just use local accounts.

right. because they don't care about your hardware just your payment relationship with them.

> cloning a machine from hardware a decade old onto a brand new laptop may require expertise

you don't see the connection between all these facts? "coping all the work and effort you've collected on your personal machine for a decade _still_ unaccountably requires expertise."

If this were something so unusual that people would rarely want to do it this would be a reasonable point. The fact that this is such an obvious thing people want to do without having to have a monthly subscription first indicates that the product does not cater well to it's selected market segments.

I expected Windows to panic as well but Win 10 handles it relatively gracefully. It says Windows detected a change to your hardware and does a relatively decent job.

Yeah, I've done several such transplants of disks onto different hardware.. maybe even from an AMD to an Intel system once (different mainboard chipsets), and of Windows 7. As you say, it will say new hardware detected and a lot of the times will get the drivers for them from Windows Update. There are also 3rd party tools to remove no-longer existing devices from the registry, to clean the system up a bit.

Windows will, however, no longer acknowledge your license key. At least that is what happened when I swapped a Windows installation from an Intel system into an AMD system.

If you switch to a Microsoft account instead of a local account before you move your install, you can often recover your license once Windows processes the hardware change (sometimes it takes several attempts over a few reboots, their license server is special), and once that happens, you can go back to a local account, if Microsoft didn't remove that flow.

With Windows 10, I have unplugged the primary storage from an old laptop, and plugged it into a new one, without issue.

The system booted, no license issues.

Likely because on a laptop there's usually a Windows license embedded in an ACPI table. As long as you weren't moving a Pro edition installation to a machine that only had a key for Home edition, it would silently handle any re-activation necessary.

To me the most complicated thing would be to migrate an encrypted disk with the key stored in TPM. The article doesn't try to do that, but I wonder if there is a way.

If you moved the wrong stuff Linux would give you a bad time too, try /proc, /dev

Those are pseudo-filesystems though, they aren't part of the install.

Not sure where I said they were part of the install, but I meant that if you don’t exclude them bad things would happen to the cloning process

Edit: or backup process

With a block device copy approach like in TFA you don't need to worry about that because those filesystems do not exist on the block device.

When copying files (e.g. with rsync) you need to watch out for those, yes. The best way to deal with other mounts is not to copy directly from / but instead non-recursively bind-mount / to another directory and then copy from that.

> Windows would panic, certainly (because so much drivers & other state is persisted & expected)

Nope.

7B is because back in WinNT days it made sense to disable the drivers for which there are no devices in the system. Because memory and because people can't write drivers.

Nowadays it's AHCI or NVMe, which are pretty vendor agnostic, so you have 95% chance of successful boot. And if you boot is successful then Windows is fine and yes, it can grab the remaining drivers from the WU.

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