Cloning disks to swap two drives
So I have an old XPS laptop with a Samsung Evo 840 SSD 500gb in it. I also have a small 12" Thinkpad X230 with a 240gb Adata su630 SSD.The old XPS needs refurbishment, to ideally make it a media server, but I really currently want the X230 as a chuckaroundable work machine when I'm visiting clients (got it cheaply on Ebay, so I don't have to take my newer expensive laptop). What I ideally want to do is to swap the drives between the two machines, as the Evo 840 is a lot better. But I want the OS and everything on it to stay the same for each machine (Win10 Pro on the X230 and Win10 Home on the XPS). Can I use Acronis Clone disk to do this? Plus note that while the Windows key is on the bottom of the XPS laptop, I cannot find the Windows key on the X230 anywhere. If things go wrong, how do I go about resetting the X230 back to it's original state?


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Thanks for the info. Looks pretty comprehensive. Yeah, I thought would need 3rd drive, but didn't know could put 2 on one drive (thought needed 4th drive).
Only question then is if things go wrong, and I need to restore to the original drive, would it be a problem if I don't have the windows licence key? I can't see the sticker on the x230 (eBay purchase). Or if the x230 detects new hardware with the SSD will it demand the key?
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Darren, if both of your laptops are currently licensed & activated for Windows 10, then just swapping over the drives will not break that activation or license provided you keep to the same edition that was licensed for each laptop. Edition = Home, Pro, Enterprise etc.
The only other option here would be to just buy new, better, faster SSD drives for each laptop and backup / recover from each to the new drives, leaving the old drives as they are & untouched as an easy immediate backup method to get back to square one.
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Dealing with the product key can be difficult if you don't know the origins of the license. Since you bought the X230 on eBay, it might not be so easy to determine. Here are a couple links to check out. It may be that all is OK.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12440/windows-10-activate
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10749/windows-10-find-product-key
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Just to say I followed Steve's advice and it pretty much worked. There was a couple of problems, esp with the hardware (Dell laptops are the worst at getting to anything), but got there in the end.
While the bigger drive was no issue whatsoever (software or hardware; ThinkPads are pretty good), the smaller drive was a problem. Acronis rescue media just wouldn't allow me to select the smaller drive to restore to, even though the uncompressed data size was a lot smaller than the smaller drive could handle. I tried the Windows version of the rescue media as well as the Linux version, but neither worked. I tried selecting just the main drive partition (C:), and looked to resize it, but it wouldn't work.
In the end I had all my old stuff backed up or used on my main PC, so I just booted up the Dell, and reactivated with the correct Windows key, then unlinked any specific apps from the Dell that would cause overlap with the ThinkPad. Worked fine.
Note I upgraded to ATI 2020 (from 2018) for all of this.
Thanks for the help Steve!
Ps. Turns out they were both Win10 Pro. Totally forgot I had upgraded the old one from Win8 to Win8 Pro back in the day. Don't know if that made things easier.
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Darren, glad to read that you got through all of this migration despite some of the niggles along the way. Thank you for sharing your feedback.
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