Aller au contenu principal

Does Universal Restore work to restore from a windows 8.1 backup to a new Windows 10 Pro PC?

Thread needs solution

Does Universal Restore work to restore from a windows 8.1 backup to a new Windows 10 Pro PC?

If this is possible are the steps any different from restoring from the same operating system?

0 Users found this helpful

Hello Dwight!

Universal Restore is for handling dissimilar hardware. i.e. Old harddrive/motherboard/cpu died and you restore to new hardware from your backup. If you are restoring a system volume: it can't magically replace the os you have with another.

If the question is, whether you can restore a w8.1 backup to a w10 capable system, it depends on whether w8 compatible drivers are supplied for the new system. Usually it works even if not explicitly said though. If you have the w10 pc model name at hand I could take a look.

-- Peter

Dwight,

Windows 10 provides great driver support so your question then dependent more on hardware than software.

As Peter says, Universal Restore is not the product you should use to perform your task.  Acronis Recovery Media is the proper tool for doing this.  My opinion here is that restoring a Windows 8.1 image to a Windows 10 machine should work.  In my experience patience is required of the user here when the newly imaged disk is first booted.  It can take several minutes for Windows 10 to install proper drivers for the new hardware introduced to the old image.

Hello Dwight!

Dell doesn't seem to have drivers available for Windows 8 for this model. Neither do other manufacturers with the same B460 chipset. Overall it looks B460 based motherboards strictly have w10 in mind.

It's unlikely you'll find new hardware with win8.1 support since it's main support ended in 2018 and extended will end in 2023. 

-- Peter

Thanks for the help. I decided to upgrade the original PC to Windows 10 and then restore from a backup image of that. Moving from these old OSs isn't elegant, for sure.

Hello Dwight!

Though it's not a free upgrade anymore, but you can upgrade win 7 or 8.1 to win10 in place, so you can skip reinstalling all your apps. A backup would be advised but you already have that.

Here is some guidance: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows_install/how-to-upgrade-from-windows-81-to-10/319d102c-d94e-46e5-b9e8-dacc4f5f2915

-- Peter

Dwight, if your new PC comes with Windows 10 already installed, then make sure that you Activate this then make a full disk backup of the Win 10 OS before attempting to bring your old Windows 8.1 OS to that machine (even after upgrading to Win 10 on the old PC) - this is your method of getting back to base if the migration does not go smoothly!

Even though Microsoft no longer publishes information about free upgrades from Windows 7 or 8.1 to Win 10, this has still been available and they have not closed that door!  I have certainly been able to upgrade a Win 7 PC to 10 just a month or so back!

I did a complete image of the laptop drive and saved that to a network drive. Then, I upgraded the Laptop to Windows 10 Pro without a license key (it was 8.1 core). Cloned the laptop drive to the new Windows 10 Pro PC.

After cloning it started up, did some driver up dates and was fully activated on Windows 10 Pro. Updated the Quickbooks licensing and that was about it.

 

That sounds great Dwight, glad to hear that it all went smoothly!