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Moving to a new laptop

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My old laptop is at its end…5 years old. I have a number of legacy software programs that cannot be reinstalled so I’m hoping and trying desperately to move the entire contents of my existing computers hard drive to the new computer. I have been creating Clones to a large hard drive using the “On another machine” and am ready, but it’s just not that straightforward as plugging in the new drive. I’ve read things like creating an external bootable disk, but I’m not sure if that needs to be made from the old computer or the new computer? If anyone can point me to a video or lengthy detailed instructions I would be so happy?

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Steven, welcome to these public User Forums.

As you have started to understand, the process of migrating the installed OS from an older laptop to a new one is not as simple as plugging in a clone of the old OS disk drive.

There are a number of initial considerations:

What is the BIOS boot mode of the old laptop?  Is this a Legacy / MBR boot system, or is it using UEFI / GPT.  You can run the msinfo32 command in Windows on the laptop and check the BIOS mode information shown in the right panel of the report produced.

What Windows OS is installed on the old laptop?  If this is Windows 10 or 11, then you stand a much better chance of succeeding than if you have an older Windows installed.  This is because Windows 10 + has much better handling of changed hardware.

What type of disk drive is in the old laptop?  Typically this will be a 2.5" SATA drive but the new laptop is more likely to have a PCIe Nvme SSD drive (which is a small card drive that looks like a memory stick).  This means that additional device drivers may be needed for the SSD to be recognised by Acronis bootable rescue media used to restore the backup from the old laptop. That rescue media should ideally be created on the new laptop not the old one, and created as the 'Simple' WinPE media on that machine.

Note: when you get the new laptop, please ensure that you make a full backup of the installed OS that comes with it before attempting any migration of the old laptop OS.  This is your safety net in case the migration is not successful.