Hello all, Once I have performed a fresh installation of Windows 10, Drivers, Firewall & AV, is it possible to make a back up of that and restore it to another machine? The other machines have the exact same specs as the initial one! If that is not possible to perform from after formatting and before installing Windows, would it possible to start the restore after the Windows installation is completed? I am looking for something that can be done through a USB stick if possible. (without the need to remove the hard drive from the guest machines) It might be a stupid question, but all I can find is how to transfer an installation from a HDD to a SSD. Other solutions seem to require the use of paid software. Cheers
You probably get a lot of "good and wise suggestions and teachings", but the short answer is - not possible. But you don't have to believe it, try it yourself, maybe you're the first in the world to have it possible.
Why not create a 100% system backup using macrium, acronis, etcetc... and recover to the other system?
Same, create a wim or acronis image...restore, done. Acronis can also recover to another totally different computer with universal restore, works wonders. fun fact: I once accidentaly booted my laptop with a ssd cloned from another computer I had, and...it booted
Yep, there is no HAL defined (or something like that), so win 10 system hdd/ssd's can be interchanged/cloned and the system will boot.
Why would he do this? There is an existing install to be cloned and a target system, backup existing system to a usb/usb hdd > recover on target system.
Because it is problematic to add a new user. The experience index needs to be reset. Installed programs may not work properly. I know, I tried. The disk backup will not work. You cannot activate Windows separately. The solution is the reference os.
You will find that capturing an operating system in either a backup or a windows tool is much more difficult than just re-installing the same OS using an appropriate install media. There's a lot of trial and error involved and a lot of learning. Also, any custom hardware drivers or even windows downloaded drivers for video cards will cause problems and need to be uninstalled before the process is done. Basically the reference method that they were describing is the official MS tool version of a backup. You log out and run ctrl-shift-f3 to log in as admin with the sysprep program. You then uninstall anything that will cause problems like users or custom drivers. Then you run the sysprep with the generalize option to remove any user data because you'll be copying it to another machine. Then you run the dism capture-wim command as suggested earlier. You can practice all this on a virtual machine and a vhd file. You can create an empty expandable vhd file with diskpart and point your vm to use that as the drive. Then when done with the sysprep, you can attach the vhd to system (mounting it) and capture the appropriate drive path. If you can successfully do that, you can try it on your main system. I'd recommend doing that just to learn how confusing the process is before you waste your time trying this. You will likely give up and just install windows from a proper ISO.