Hi guys, I've a question... I'm just thinking to buy a 2nd hdd caddy so I can move my notebook hd there, taking off my dvdrom to install it and buying a new ssd sata (crucial m4) for windows 8, cuz actually I've an asus x53s and the hd isnt so good so I want to increase the performance. My questions are: 1) This will kill my activation status? 2) Can I move my windows installation on the ssd or I've to reinstall it from the dust? If I can't, what about the activation? This new setup will change my activation code? thx!
only changing the hd on system will not bust ur activaton... for activation to remain intact u are allowed 3 hardware changes not more... answer to ur second question just use dism to create a wim image of ur online system and then restore it on any partition of the new hd...
sorry for my earlier post but it... I as well learnt this minut ago that hd change can trigger reactivation...
OS migration from one HDD to a new/different HDD or SSD will definitely not kill your activation. I have done it so many times in windows from HDD to HDD. However, if you plan to move from conventional hard disk to SSD, it is better to reinstall. Reinstall was a better choice for me in win 7 but I do not know about Win 8. Takes some time but it is worth it for most people. If it was hard disk to hard disk, then reinstall is definitely not required. Most reputed SSD manufacturers have cloning software that is free. Just check or go to TPB and download the boot CD of acronis. Connect only the image backup source and the destination (new disk) and restore.
First thing to do if you like to clone the HD, resize the existing system partition (drive: C) to a 350MB lower size than the destination HD (SSD) will have to avoid size problems. There should be a total of min. 2 partitions: 1. Recovery/System Reserved partition and 2. the C Drive System partition. The size of both should be together a bit more low (just a few MB's) than the available size on destination drive, in your caseSSD.
If you can get hold of Acronis True Image 2013 boot cd, this will make a backup image of your W8 partition and will restore to another HD of a different size and will be activated provided it is on the same machine. I have restored from a 40Gb to a 160Gb and from a 160Gb mechanical to a 60Gb SSD without problems. Acronis is excellent and easy to use but make sure you run through the different options available, for instance you can split the backup image into DVD size segments and choose different compression levels.I use normal compression.