Image your system with free Macrium

WHS,
I think the thread's branched into system migration! As you say of course Macrium can reimage to a new HDD.

whs said:

JDH1 said:

While contrasting Macrium Free to the competition, someone said that Paragon can restore a Win 7 image to a new HDD, and that restored machine will then boot, run, activate, and validate, etc., but they said that this is not the case with Macrium Free.

Are they mostly speaking to the issues of validation and activation, especially with regard to what happens after a restore to the machine specific ID codes, etc.? I would think it would be absolutely mandatory for all image backup programs to have to be able to handle those things when restoring. Is this not so?

Free Macrium can restore to a new HDD as long as the receiving partition is equal or greater in size than the originating partition.

What they were talking about was probably the "shrink" facility of Paragon which Macrium has only in the Pro version.

The aspect they were emphasizing had to do with activation and validation after a restore. However if the user was doing a restore after a HDD replacement, and if this new hardware triggered a problem with the MS checks, how could Paragon (or any backup program) shield the system from this problem?

mjf said:

WHS,
I think the thread's branched into system migration! As you say of course Macrium can reimage to a new HDD.

I believe the aspect they were emphasizing had to do with activation and validation after a restore, not someone trying to migrate to a new system.

I mainly use Windows own imaging and have not had a problem with activation and validation of Windows and 3rd party licensed software when transferring to a new HDD.
I would not expect Macrium to be different in this respect. The only change here is the HDD serial number. It might be a problem if more hardware elements were different.

mjf said:

I mainly use Windows own imaging and have not had a problem with activation and validation of Windows and 3rd party licensed software when transferring to a new HDD.
I would not expect Macrium to be different in this respect. The only change here is the HDD serial number. It might be a problem if more hardware elements were different.

I'm glad to hear this, and it makes good sense. So now I need to find the post where the original comment was made and see if in fact the person was speaking about system migration. It wasn't identified as such, but maybe the post was incomplete. I'll look....

whs said:

The aspect they were emphasizing had to do with activation and validation after a restore. However if the user was doing a restore after a HDD replacement, and if this new hardware triggered a problem with the MS checks, how could Paragon (or any backup program) shield the system from this problem?

I have never seen anybody run into an activation problem if you just replace the HDD - and there should not be a problem. That is different if you replace the mobo or try to dump the image on another system. And there you are right - it would be the same with any imaging program.

As just said to mjf, I'll look for this person's post and see if what they meant was system migration (as you and others first guessed).