Hi and thank you for reading. Hope you won't mind helping on this matter. My apologies if some of what I write doesn't make sense as I'm not very good with computers.

I have an older modeled HP Pavilion Laptop with a lot of music making software that I wish to clone an exact copy that can be run on a different laptop, a new ASUS with Windows 11. I've read that utilities like Disk Genius can clone the drive to an external and you can run that drive via usb on another computer with a different OS after pressing F11 to access a boot menu with options or something like that. Can you please advise if this is possible? It would be really nice if I could still run all that software directly from the portable drive on any laptop.

Please advise on this matter. Thank you for the help. It is greatly appreciated!

 

no this won't work, Windows creates a registry, which is a database of everything, the systems drivers, the paths, the variable everything necessarry to boot windows into a functioning environment with the software you have installed, the updates and patches that have been installed, the hardware drivers to make the software work on the hardware, etc.

When you change the hardware, your drivers won't work on your new hardware. Your registry wont work on your new software.

you can either recreate your old drive, by running a utility to list all the shit you have installed, which will create a report you can use as a basis to recreate that list on your new machine.
or b. you can image your old disk, and create a virtual machine within or under your new machine, while this sounds nice, it will have some caveats, such as overhead on your cpu, you are basically running 2 operating system simultaneously, one inside a virtual machine inside the actual operating system, depending on the software you are running this can produce latency which is not desirable for music programs, you may also have problems connecting your audio interface and midi devices thru the virtual ports.

Your best bet is keep you old laptop, use it for what you like using it for, and slowly build the new laptop into a machine you can be happy using for whatever you want to do. That way you have a fall backup for when windows 11 fucks up and kills your shit.

basically never trust a computer, it will fuck you soooner or later..

 

Thank you for the detailed explanation! Much appreciated!! Makes it a lot easier to understand, especially the drivers part! I guess cloning a drive would only work if I had the exact same laptop with Windows 10. Option B sounds like I would need an extremely powerful laptop in order to run 2 operating systems at once which is definitely beyond my new laptop's capabilities. Wish there was a way to run that VM without having do so using the laptops own OS. Would be really cool if one day, someone developed a software that could allow you to run a cloned drive from a portable drive using generic drivers the same way you could plug a flash drive with a MUGEN game in any windows computer and be able to play it....

Can you please recommend some utilities that could list all the things installed in a computer. I just downloaded something called uninstallview but it seems to only programs in the registry and doesn't include many .dll software and plug-ins installed in my vst plug-ins folder. I wish there was a program that would also tell me where some of the software presets/favorites for the plug-ins are as I kind of forgot where many of them are stored. Thanks in advance!

 

I had success doing a backup of my desktop main PC windows and then restoring it to my old Dell Laptop. Important: with the option "hardware independent restore" activated.

1. You can do this with soft like Acronis, Aomei Backupper (my case) or similar
2. No guarantees, do it at your own risk

Edited: as several have said the BIOS must be set to the same type of partition/boot system: UEFI or the old MBR.

Thanks to the Windows/UEFI mess I've gone back to MBR since it seems UEFI adds more troubles than advantages. Which is very fucked up.
Also related: disabling TPM etc etc (at the BIOS level)

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2024 at 4:46 PM

Yes, there are sw that allow to create a win "to go" on external USB drive.
One of them that I tested (and worked) is Hasleo Win to USB, but it is supposed to run on the same computer, unless you want to run in drivers problems and other PC rants.

With that, basically it copies the system partition on the external drive and then makes it bootable.

 

If you get hold of acronis backup (a WINPE version not linsux) 11.5 or 12 with "System Restore" you can create an image of your current system which later on you can slipstream drivers to it for the other hardware. I have done this before (with win10 and lower) so I know it works. That's for the OS. As far as the audioware working as it did on the previous machine... This mostly depends on whether you're using scene released stuff which is somewhat platform independent given the fact you don't have all that license bullshit fucking you up. Just fyi, Windows 11 is also a POS in the fact that unless you have used a build that ignores the all the TPM garbage you'll end up running into a road block there. Solution; run a ghostspectre (or similar) build that has the TPM junk turned off.

 

I work for the world's largest professional services firm, I'm a global Windows desktop architect, I'm regularly in Redmond or meeting with them when they come to me. Some of the advice here is solid, and some is a little off.

The short version is, it's always better to do a clean install. And with the exception of some fairly specialized and expensive hardware configurations, you don't want to run Windows from an external drive.

A slightly longer answer is you can move your bootable Windows hard drive to another machine - even another make and model, potentially. The one big hurdle is the boot configuration. You generally can't go from AHCI to RAID (it takes a lot of planning and expertise). If the UEFI mode is compatible between both machines, then you can probably get it to boot, and you'll have a lot of work to do afterwards in terms of cleaning up unused drivers and installing new ones. It's really only a last resort thing to do.

There are third-party apps like Acronis and Macrium that will generalize a Windows image so you can migrate it to new hardware. You can manually do the same thing by running Sysprep before you move the drive from the old system to the new one.

In any of those scenarios, you will want to either back up your drive using a disk imaging utility or back up all of your files and folders somewhere. An image of your drive is better because it eliminates any "oops, I forgot about that" moments. You can also boot and run that disk image in a virtual machine environment like Hyper-V.

Windows 11 isn't that bad, and TPM shouldn't be an issue, but I don't recommend encrypting your drives unless you really need to secure your data, in which case you should have that stored somewhere else and not on a machine for making music.

 

this is a good place to start, I haven't used a utility like this in about 15 years, used to be one or 2 on the Hiren Boot cd ver 8

anyhow...

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=utility+for+listing+software+installed+on+computer&ia=web

 

here's a way to get windows to do it for you..

https://thedroidguy.com/how-to-get-a-list-of-all-software-installed-on-windows-1263640

 

Thank you so much for all the replies!! Man I learned a TON of information after reading them!! I am definitely wary about messing with boot configuration of the new ASUS Win 11 since that BIOS is definitely different than my HP Pavilion, especially since I'm not good with computers. With disk imaging, is that basically a clone of the entire computer (including OS and installed software) except in image form that can be run on a different computer using any virtual machine software (provided the computer is powerful enough)? If that's the case, then I should definitely use the image method. Also, with the disc imaging method, I can assume that I won't need to make the portable drive into a bootable drive exclusive for the backed up content.

 

I upgraded from an Acer Nitro VN7-791 W10 (Intel i7-4710HQ) with thousands of plugins and multimedia programs to an Asus ROG Strix i9-13980hx. Migration was crucial for me, because reinstalling thousands of software and plugins was a no go.

One problem was, after I tried W11 on the new laptop, that I was totally shocked, that the start menu was no longer there. Migrating to W11 would have meant, that my hundreds of well organized shortcuts, often containing a short description of the tool, would have been gone, when using W11!
But how could I ever remember, what tool was that, that I needed three years ago, to remux a certain video format? What a stunning implosion of a company, that once was famous, for holding up compatibility and well proven concepts...

So I was forced, even if I would have been willing to reinstall everything, to stay with W10.

I made a fresh W10 installation on the Asus Strix and checked if all hw parts were supported by the "W11" drivers on the Asus hp. I noticed, that the claim of Asus, that only W11 was supported, was not true and that the drivers were installing and working properly in W10.

Macrium Reflect is my preferred image tool and so I knew, they have a hw migration tool, which I intended to use.
But it didn't work.

Then I said to myself: Windows has an extremely good hw layer abstraction mechanism, why not trying to let Windows handle the changed hw?

So first I installed the new SSD in the old computer and migrated the system to run on the new SSD and made sure, that everything was running smoothly.
Then I installed the new SSD in the new notebook and the SSD was - not recognized...

In OneNote I have written down the notes:

This helped:
NVMe drive missing or not booting? There’s a simple fix!
https://scottiestech.info/2022/04/26/nvme-drive-missing-or-not-booting-theres-a-simple-fix/

Inaccessible Boot Device Windows 11: How To Fix
https://www.compujourney.com/inaccessible-boot-device-windows-11/


installed the Intel RST-driver with the help of Power-Shell

in BIOS I deactivated VMD
→ BSOD

→ extended bootmenu: start Windows in safe mode: works!

Let windows hw abstraction layer finish its job detecting the new hw.

→ Restart

→ BINGO!

IIRC HW manager showed a few exclamation marks for the inbuilt Realtek audio card - ofcourse, because of the old drivers and the missing new ones, which I still had to install (after uninstalling the old ones, ofcourse).

And some software and plugins just needed re-authorization, because of the changed hw.

The system runs as stable as a fresh installation.

ps: funnily the most problems I had, was to get rid of the Asus bloatware...

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2024 at 5:46 PM

DiskGenius, you're welcome.
ive used it 30+ times. works perfectly

 

Nirsoft has a bunch of small, portable, useful utilities for Windows. There is UninstallView that lists installed programs and you can uninstall programs with it, too. DevManView, DriverView, SearchMyFiles, NirCmd are also useful, then some really great Windows and network password recovery tools... lots of good stuff there.

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2024 at 6:48 PM

Good job. Also, add this to your notes for next time or for anyone else paying attention - just install the Intel RST driver on your old system before you move the hard drive to the new system (or put it back in your old system, install the driver, then move to the new system). It's much easier that way.

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2024 at 8:46 PM

Much appreciated!! Wow nirsoft has a ton of super useful utilities!! The password recovery tools and search my files

Thank you for the instruction. Definitely writing this down! Not sure if I'm confident enough to try this by myself on a new laptop without supervision from an expert given my lack of tech experience. As a total newbie to this, it seems the safest and least complicated way might be to make an image of the computer and use a virtual machine software to run just like what Garamondo Furbish, saccamano, and ToddlerTN recommended. Much like what Xupito said about the BIOS being set to the same type of partition/boot system, if I mess that up on the new laptop, I probably won't know how to correct it so it can boot Win 11.

BTW, if one were to run the image from a vm, does that mean you can do it on any computer without having to worry about booting or hardware differences or do you still need to install a bunch of drivers? Also, generally how powerful does the laptop or desktop need to be in order to run the vm of the image smoothly since Garamondo said it's like running a 2nd entire Windows system inside the Windows 11. Thanks in advance for the help!

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2024 at 9:03 PM

A disk image is a clone of whatever you add to it - could be an entire drive, or a partition, or multiple drives/partitions. You can think of it sort of like a Zip archive that can be opened to extract specific files/folders, or if you back up all the partitions, depending on the tool you use for that, it can also be bootable in a hypervisor. Acronis and Macrium are good tools for that, and others have mentioned alternatives.

At a minimum, creating a disk image should ensure you don't permanently lose anything, as you can always go back and retrieve things out of that image. Of course, that assumes you don't lose the disk image or modify it in a way that damages it. Once you attach it to a hypervisor and try to boot it, you're making changes to it that are irreversible, so I recommend you store a virgin copy of it somewhere until you're sure you have everything working in good order.

I actually would leave your original drive untouched, image the drive, then restore that image to a new drive on the new system and go from there. That gives you a lot of options. You could even retore it to a new drive on the old system, boot on the old system and run Sysprep to generalize the cloned OS for new hardware, install any critical drivers for the new system such as a drive controller (that's the most critical one you may need in place ahead of time for the new hardware to be able to boot your old OS) and then move it to the new system and install any additional drivers.