Can I restore a Macrium bacup to a PC with different CPU?

Birk said:

Interesting idea - thanks. I didn't know Macrium could do that. Will check it out.

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Yes, Reflect can restore just a single partition, and can resize it to fit the available space. That was how I migrated my Legacy/MBR image to a UEFI/GPT machine.

Bree said:

I used Reflect to restore the C: partition from a system image of my old Legacy/MBR machine to replace the C: partition of a clean install of the same version of Win10 on a new UEFI/GPT machine. Then used the Reflect recovery usb's 'fix Windows boot problems' option to rebuild the BCD. The end result was a transfer of my complete system to a new machine, not just my user files but all my installed software and configurations.

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Onboarding to Windows 11 is easy - post #8

I personally cloned and moved my image using Macrium Reflect from a dell gaming laptop to a custom built pc. I would say if it works go for it, but if you have problems I wouldn't complain as it is not intended. For me, windows booted up fine with the changes and made mostly good decisions. However, it is a good idea to go in and clean up device drivers. I think your machines are similar enough to be fine though.

garlin said:

It stopped being a myth after the September 2025 CU's.

Mark didn't predict a future Windows where they finally enforce SID checks on shared network resources. But don't take my word, ask all the IT admins complaining about it now. If you ask MS support nicely for a KIR, they'll give you a GPO policy to temporarily disable SID checking.

KB5070568 - Kerberos and NTLM authentication failures due to duplicate SIDs

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Yeah, it is a problem.

pseymour said:

The ones who do things incorrectly.

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To be fair, sometimes you are like me a long time ago and used to work in a school district with not really any alternatives haha. AD was not even in place, we still had zenworks then. What a mess that place was. Luckily when I left, we got things properly fixed.

andrew129260 said:

To be fair, sometimes you are like me a long time ago and used to work in a school district with not really any alternatives haha

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Alternatives to what? Sysprep comes with Windows, and the support policy has always been to sysprep NT-family Windows versions. That’s true regardless of whether you’re in a domain or workgroup.

pseymour said:

Alternatives to what? Sysprep comes with Windows, and the support policy has always been to sysprep NT-family Windows versions. That’s true regardless of whether you’re in a domain or workgroup.

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Not sure why but zenworks would not work when I tried messing with it. They had this image I had to use that was made with zenworks installed and configured and the apps already on it.

Whole place was held together with duct tape and prayers. Lots of people including myself who didn't know what we were doing at the time (in regards to imaging and zenworks) and learning as we went. Once we got AD in place we then got system images and sysprep and all that stuff worked out. But that was because we got an actual network admin who knew what they were doing and we were able to push it all out. As well as learn from them.

Probably a unique case honestly but that place had no structure when I started there. Which I am betting a lot of places are like that and when you don't know better crap happens.

Yeah I can see that. Sometimes it's the admin that makes bad decisions, and sometimes it's the admin's boss that wants to cut corners and get things "out the door." Either way, if you skimp on doing the right thing, it catches up with you eventually. Or it catches up with some poor sap down the road.

In the situation you describe, it's the fault of whoever made the image. Plain and simple.

Success!
I completed the transition from my old Intel N100 WIn11 Pro system to my new AMD Ryzen 5 5500U system last night. Thanks to everyone here who provided guidance - I'm sure I would have been far more nervous without all that input. The new system is running A-OK now, even though there are a couple of tweaks yet to be made. Here are the key steps I took to make the transition:

1. Complete the installation of Win11 Pro on the new Ryzen system. This was far easier than I expected because it never asked to create a Microsoft account; Instead it came up with a Local account only. My guess is the Win11 Pro that was installed on the new machine was tweaked (Rufus?) to do that. The PC manufacturer is a Chinese company named BeeLink, so of course they can do whatever they want.

2. Install Macrium Backup on the Ryzen system and make disk image backup of the Ryzen boot drive. This was insurance in case I messed something up that resulted in an unbootable system.

3. Restore my latest N100 Macrium backup to the Ryzen system. The restore took about half the time the N100 required to make it.

4. Boot the Ryzen system. It first came up with some messages about updating hardware drivers. Then it rebooted to the standard Windows startup screen. I figured I was home free at that point because my N100 system has a Junction Link that puts all Temp files on a second hard drive that I hadn't installed yet. But Win 11 booted fine without it.

5. I wasn't home free. My working configuration has 2 monitors, the primary is in Landscape mode and the secondary in Portrait mode. I also have a wireless lighted keyboard and a wireless trackball. Bothe of these use Bluetooth to connect.
When I hooked up the Ryzen to all this the boot screen was on the Portrait monitor, so everything was oriented 90 degrees from horizontal. My keyboard worked, but the trackball did not - I had no mouse action at all. I fixed this by installing the Bluetooth dongle for the trackball, which I had not needed on the N100 system. (Both PC's have built-in Bluetooth support.) So I still have a bit of work to sort this out.

6. I could not get the system to recognize what was my Primary monitor. So I rotated the secondary enough to read text without breaking my neck. Then all of a sudden, with no warning or message, the Primary monitor came on and I was able to get both monitors working OK using the standard dual monitor option.

7. I had to do some extra work getting my second hard drive working. Basically the N100 has a slot for a PCIE SSD card, but the Ryzen does not. Instead it has an internal space for a standard SSD hard drive, so I mucked about transferring everything from the PCIE card to an unused SSD drive I had lying about. That is working fine in the Ryzen now.

8. With everything working OK I noticed the following oddities: all my animated cursors were gone and replaced by the standard Windows ones. Also, the system colors were totally different, and my fixed image screensaver was replaced with one of the stock Windows ones. These 3 issues were easy to fix using the standard Personalization screen.

So I'm a pretty happy camper now - and thanks again to everyone who helped me do this. I'm happy to answer any questions anyone might have.