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2014 True Image

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Just got a win8.1 Dell laptop 1TB HDD to twin my 2013 ASUS win8.1 w/True Image 2014.

1) fear of old HDD blowing up, even though emplying disk backups to ext.HDD via USB routinely

2) biz core softwares mostly do NOT work on win11 (tested on new laptop) + so may to upgrade them + no way to replace them with bigger/better/faster (no inventors out there or dare to trust new MS OSs?)

 

Was thinking the safest way to have all this core w8.1 software to be immortal was to Acronis File Backup to USB-HDD from desktop to laptop. 

Q:

Desktop has Acronis TI installed

ext.HDD will accept data

Now ...... does laptop need Acronis TI installed on it to receive this data?

 

Why the File way?

Afraid a disk backup would carry drivers, et al. that would render the laptop "dead"

 

 

I guess I could do a simple backup but that's way slower right?

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If your new laptop came with Windows 11 installed on it, then there are various issues that you are going to face if trying to migrate your older Windows 8.1 OS and all installed applications and data from your older 2013 ASUS Win 8.1 system!

Windows 11 requires UEFI for BIOS boot along with using GPT for the disk partition scheme.

The 2013 ASUS is almost certainly using Legacy BIOS boot with MBR disk partitions.

There will be OS licensing issues in moving Win 8.1 to the new laptop unless you have a license that allows such a hardware move?

There are likely to be device driver issues with installing Win 8.1 on the Win 11 laptop and you will need to check the Dell support web site to see if they provide any device drivers for Win 8.1 for that model of laptop?  Most new laptops will only have device drivers for Win 10 or 11.

Assuming that all the issues above can be resolved, then you would still need to use the Acronis Universal Restore tool to perform this type of migration but with no guarantee of success.

See KB 65413: Acronis True Image 2021: Restoring to dissimilar hardware with Acronis Universal Restore and in particular review Steps 4 and 5 of this document.

Also KB 2149: Acronis Universal Restore

KB 36187: Windows activation required after restore with Acronis Universal Restore, cloning or converting backup to virtual machine

KB 45432: Acronis Software: Troubleshooting Universal Restore and Bootability Issues

KB 46405: Acronis True Image: Restored Operating System Fails to Boot

I would suggest considering converting your 2013 ASUS system to a virtual machine and then running that VM on the new Dell laptop while keeping Win 11.  You could use Hyper-V which is integrated with Win 11 if you have the Pro version of the OS, or use VmWare to run the VM.

Using a VM effectively divorces the PC hardware from the Win 8.1 OS and programs - this can give similar performance to a native system provided the host system has sufficient memory and a reasonable CPU.

I run various VM's on my own HP Omen gaming laptop with 32GB RAM and Intel i7 CPU - these range from Win 95 through to Win 11 VM's (though not Win 8.1 as I jumped that version going from 7 to 10).