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

 

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