Transfer OS issues

[tech.py.303]

I am trying to find out the best and safest way to transfer an OS and all of the files and application to a new machine

The issue which I am having is that the new machine has different drivers to the old machine and the new machine will not expect the old OS - it just keeps going into repair mode in the new machine. And also, lets just say that the old machine is not available either so the previous OS is currently in a USB external case.

The old OS is Windows 10 and the new machine comes with Windows 11. The plan is to use my previous OS then basically upgrade to Windows 11 but I am also completely happy to just transfer everything and disregard Window 10 entirely - I actually like Windows 11

The other issue is that I have a very important excel file which wasn't saved properly on the secondary storage which has the old OS on and it is very important that I can restore this file but it seems like it will only work on the machine which it was created on - in reality this is my most important concern out of everything which has been said.

 

[root]

This certainly sounds like a pickle; ideally the files would have been backed up while the disk was inside a physical machine but these things happen.

First thing I'd say to do would be to make a full backup of the hard disk - last thing you want to do is try to recover data from a 'live' OS/disk.

The normal way to get the data from the disk would be to plug it into another machine and copy across the files you need. But if you are absolutely unable to get the file to load without booting from the disk, I would say it's worth booting from the external hard disk in a virtual machine - just be advised this is a fairly advanced technique.

This site has the process documented: How to Boot From a USB Drive in VirtualBox

If the file is super important/critical, I would say stop messing with it and send to a professional data recovery firm though these guys charge a lot of money for their services.

 

[tech.py.303]

Thank you very much for your reply.

I'd discovered that the excel file can be recovered from another machine, just by installing Office, and registering the copy by signing into my Microsoft account; and, I'd discovered after all of that concern that there wasn't anything important on the document to recover, anyway, which I already had on another file which backup successfully.

After I found out about the above file I decided to clone the Windows 11 drive, entirely, to my original drive (which is way much bigger in size and a much faster). The drive which came with the machine I decided to use as an external backup drive instead. All drives mentioned are M.2.

They say that it is always best to start fresh with OS than upgrading and I totally agree on that front. I must admit Windows 11 seems to be way much faster than Windows 10. I am also wondering whether it is because I have a new machine.... but this new machine is only an i3 with gen 11 process using the CPU graphics. I even have installed all of my software including Internet Security and Glasswire, both running in the background, and the performance of the machine hasn't even noticeably decreased . I am not too keen that I had to use my Microsoft account to be able to use Windows 11 but the way the world is going I can see why they have done this for, I know that there must be a work around but what's the point.

Thanks for the advice regrading the booting from a virtual machine I never knew that this could be achieve, this way. I have never had any use for VM yet but maybe when personal computers get very fast then I might consider ever using them.

 

[root]

Glad that you managed to get it sorted, one way or another!

Windows 11 is quite nice, I've not really explored it that much having recently forced it onto my relatively elderly laptop that was built originally for Windows 8, but it does run pretty well - my view is it's more a reskin/rethink of 10 more than anything else at the moment. So much for Windows 10 being the last ever edition of Windows... whether it will be viewed as favourably as 10 was only time will tell. With that said except for maybe XP a Windows release is rarely met all that positively once the new and shiny effect has worn off.

You will generally find the 11th gen CPUs are rather performant, and they provide the graphics oomph to make Win11 fly. I'm currently towards the end of replacing hundreds of i7 6th/7th gen machines with i5 11th and 12th gen and they outperform the older "better" CPUs considerbly.

Certainly Microsoft are going all-in on accounts/cloud based systems, both for home users and in the corporate world. Brings its own issues about but the only way around/out is to look towards other OSes - potentially MacOS though Apple are also pushing iCloud, or Linux systems such as Ubuntu or RHEL. Perhaps something to try in a Virtual Machine!

 

[tech.py.303]

I have always been a big fan of XP (for obvious reasons) and then W10 came along and I thought to myself this is just as good as XP but with with improvements - W10 is XP but on steroids ! Then this year came along and I had to reinstall W10 (with all its updates), and wow, this version was an improvement than one of the original version which I had kept on using whenever I needed to reinstall, and, because I had reinstall on multiple occasions I could quite easy compare the speeds on how long it takes at which this latest version installed. With this latest version of W10(2022) there was certainly a nice slick and shiny feel to the GUI and I thought to myself that this was it and I will just stay with W10 instead of migrating to W11, but, with all this messing around (as mention in this thread), I am so glad the way things have panned out because now I am a huge fan of W11 - even more so than the latest version of W10. With W11, I like the way Microsoft has designed the new taskbar and how it feels more like a Mac, even I have never really used a Mac, and with the explorer windows the corners have been nicely rounded off so it does certainly feel much more visually pleasing and smoothing to ones eyes. I found when launching either the control panel or main settings they appeared immediately which I have never seen on previous version of Windows even on relatively fast standalone machines.

This week I have manage to find myself a Grade A Asus X515EA laptop costing me only £220 - so I am feeling pretty good about the whole situation. My second laptop which I have ever purchase (Dell G3), initially costing me between £1300-£1400 (including all the upgrades), and after a short time I had notice that there was one single pixel issue so Amazon decided to give me a 10% discount instead of returning the G3 back to them. In comparison the X515 is a real bargain compared to the G3 - although - the G3 had a discrete Nvidia GPU and an i7 and so going back to what you mentioned in your last thread I do believe that the 11th gen processor and W11 works very well in unison. But saying that I would like to test my belief out by using W11 on a 10th gen processor or one of it's predecessors.

I am only really using the X515 for general purpose stuff, trading cryptocurrencies, and software development so I'd opt for an i3 instead of an i7 which I usually op in for because I had this notion that the higher the "i" the better the performance which it is but I don't see the point in splashing out for additional spec if I am not going to be making any use, by doing, so unless cash is of unlimited supply and then that is a totally different ball game...

This is the first time I ever had purchase any machine with an i3 and I am glad that I made the right choice - I now can sell my desktop, which I was going to upgrade and convert into a dual machine, if you recall from a previous thread? But I have no purpose for a dual machine now as this new i3 laptop and W11 works very well together.

I have been thinking recently about going the alternative OS route because I can run my own bespoke trading software run from there, as I have heard that Linux runs a lot faster than Windows OS - the main reason being (which I'd found out recently) was that Linux doesn't have all the unnecessary services running in the background which would otherwise use up precious, valuable hardware resources. In the end though when I get round to doing the job I will just create a dual boot system - W11 and Linux.