Thorny migration issue ... disc copy prep for other machine

Man, I didn't even know how to title this one....
My Objective here is very simple, but getting there complicated by hdwe & sftwr issues.
The objective is simply to move a Win7 image from a big old-style desktop SATA drive to a lean/cool/tiny laptop drive - in this case the laptop drive is 100gb and the old drive 80gb. Should be a piece of cake on a robust machine but it is on a little Aopen XCcube that isn't quite healthy: it has two banks x2 sata ports but for unknown reason can only read SATA 0 so I am really limited on how to get a bunch of stuff up simultaneously. I used Paragon to shoot the image, but their recovery media is having a lot of issues trying to work with my hdwe/bios.

SOOOOO.... I'm copying the archive over to my lab mule which is a very different sys than the little XCcube. Then I'll put the laptop HDD, cleanly blank/formatted, into the "0" position on the lab mule, and the working mule drive in the 1 position, and boot from it, run paragon, recover the image to the laptop drive, and then go back to the 'cube.

MY QUESTION is this: When a blank drive is in the SATA 0 position, when the system starts up is the BIOS going to trigger something to be marked on that drive that is going to cause me activation or boot issues on the intended target system???

the dire warning on that thread suggests that you'll be unable to activate a VLK

gregrocker said:

You can try imaging it using Acronis 10+ with universal restore which removes all the drivers and activation to prepare it to start on new hardware.

Or you can use SysPrep on the source HD to do the same thing with the Win7 installer, then image it over to the laptop using free macrium Reflect or Paragon 10, even Win7 backup imaging: Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer

If you use Paragon adaptive restore, or similar - you shouldn't have any problem booting the o/s.

Activation is a separate matter. Always when transferring to a different machine, you need a windows license which allows it.

let me update my progress and fail.
I finally was able to get the other SATA bus readable in BIOS so I put the good drive on SATA 1 and the brick on SATA 0. fired up, ran Paragon B&R, did a "restore" to the newer/bigger drive, and it should have gone like every other Paragon re-image I've done but I noticed it took an incredibly long time for such a tiny drive - the thing only has about 18GB of real data in it. It just didn't feel right. Sure enough, when it was finished I refreshed Disk Management and took a look and it was just one big drive partition - did not reflect a successful write of the hidden primary system partition. pulling it up in file manager showed other problems - paragon had created essentially two folders, putting the system partition in a folder and the rest in another. Ran the Paragon Rescue Kit and it couldn't identify anything useful on the drive. no options but to wash/rinse/repeat.

Not sure what changed... this edition of Paragon Backup & Restore is a couple of releases further down the road than my last successful re-image. The way it masks options is different and I could not easily see under the hood as to what default options are being applied. I better go read up on the changes in the release. Apparently there is an option or two I need to apply that I didn't .

not in the past paragon re-images I've done. In fact the last one was on the machine I'm using at the moment, my mainstay, and I actually reduced the size of the drive, restoring to a smaller new drive, and it was activated when if first booted. like magic.

SIW2 said:

If you use Paragon adaptive restore, or similar - you shouldn't have any problem booting the o/s.

Activation is a separate matter. Always when transferring to a different machine, you need a windows license which allows it.