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Moving OEM Win 7 System from Thinkpad T420 to Thinkpad P1 with Win 10-- Using Virtual HD

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Greetings Acronis Experts!! I'm using True Image 2019.

First of all, apologies if this issue is addressed elsewhere. I did a search for about 10 minutes and couldn't find a discussion of my issue. Here it is.

I would like to move a Win 7 system  on a ThinkPad 420 (it's OEM) to a new Thinkpad P1 that runs Win 10 (Also OEM), thus having both systems on the P1. I was told by an Acronis support person just to create a new partition on the P1 and restore a copy of the Win 7 into that partition (the Win 7 does include a "System Reserved" partition), restart and, voila, the machine would immediately recognize a dual boot and allows access to both.

Needless to say, I was highly skeptical and decided instead to create a virtual hard drive.  In theory that should work, in practice, it didn't work. Here is what I did using True Image 2019.

1. Created a full backup -- not a clone -- of my Win 7 system on an external SSD, a My Passport. The  Win 7  is on an internal Crucial SSD.

2. Attached that external SSD to my Win 10 machine. The Win 10 Machine uses a Samsung SSD.

2. With the My Passport External SSD attached to my Win 10 machine, converted that backup to the VHD on the External SSD. In the process, Acronis said that drivers were missing -- for example, one of the drivers missing was <ID:ACPI_HAL\UEFI). 11 specific drivers were missing.

The error message on each notification read:

"Place the driver on removal media and click retry. Otherwise you can add the driver by applying Universal Restore under bootable media."

I ignored all

3. Copied that VHD to a separate Partition on my Win 10 P1 hard drive.

4. Mounted the VHD. Win 7 System Reserved and C Drive partitions appeared on my Win 10 machine.

5. Launched VMCreate (Hyper-V), navigated to the VHD and attempted to install it.

6. The virtual machine was created, by wouldn't load. Went through the DHCP but wouldn't load.

Note: I downloaded the P1 common drivers from

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RSVbF5C3ykSGOKnD_vLh3xX6-LxqY8VXp9X…\

Should I unpack these and run the conversion program again, pointing to these drivers?

Any help would be appreciated.

Have attached a Word File with some presumably useful screen shots. Note: when I click on the System Reserved on the Win 7 folder on my Win 10 machine, the folder reads empty.  The G drive on my Win 10 machine contains all the folders from my windows 7 C Drive.

 

 

 

Attachment Size
Picks of K&#039;s Problem.docx 394.84 KB
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Karl, welcome to these public User Forums.

See KB 60209: Acronis True Image 2018: configuring Windows native boot from VHD/VHDX files created by "Convert to VHD" feature

KB 59986: Acronis True Image 2018: how to create a virtual machine with an existing virtual hard disk

Also forum topic: Convert to VHD and Windows Licensing?

Some brief comments here as you are doing 2 things here.

  1. You are migrating your OEM Windows 7 OS to new / different hardware which requires the use of Acronis Universal Restore to try to prepare that restored OS on the new hardware.
  2. You are then converting the OEM Windows 7 OS to a virtual machine format but also on the new / different hardware.

Given the above, I would suggest trying to get the Windows 7 OS working on the Thinkpad P1 first before attempting to then convert it to a VM.

Ideally, the approach I would choose to use would be to use a separate disk drive in the TP P1 to restore the Win 7 OS backup to after removing the current Win 10 drive from that system.

After the restore has completed, boot from Acronis Universal Restore and apply all changes needed for Win 7 to work with the new hardware discovered.

Once you get Win 7 to work in a single boot mode on the P1, then make a new backup with Acronis and convert this to VHD and go from there.  Windows licensing will come into play with any OEM license being moved to different hardware.