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#1
Resurrecting previous Win7 install
I'm afraid I already know the answer to this ... but in the hopes that I'm wrong, I'm going to ask it anyway.
My five-year old PC motherboard shorted out this weekend -- leaving me with a dead box.
I have recent backups (using Macrium Reflect) of both my Vista install and my Win7 install, and BOTH are still resident on the main hard drive.
Problem is that since the Mobo is LONG out of production, I've bit the bullet and will be replacing is with a new Mobo, processor, memory, audio, and video hardware (new Mobos come with the latter builtin).
That means I can't simply plugin the drive, reboot, and be up and working.
I've read some info on Paragon's Virtualization Manager -- which appears to be able to migrate an install from one set of hardware to another -- but I'm guessing you need to do the "from" migration first, which I can't do because my machine is dead.
So, I have three questions I hope someone can answer:
1) Migration -- apart from reinstalling from scratch, is there any way to resurrect my previous install?
2) Installation -- I have both the 32-bit and 64-bit Win7 Pro DVDs, and am thinking about installing using the 64-bit. Have read the post about doing a clean install using an "upgrade" DVD (which mine is), so I presume that will go well -- as long as I don't enter a product key.
3) Reactivation -- I'm presuming this will fail (since I already activated the 32-bit version) -- but will an online attempt, or call to MS, take care of this for me? Or am I facing the prospect of having to buy a new copy of Win7 Pro?
Thanks in advance for any help in this.