Does Replacing a Motherboard Necessitate Having to Reinstall Windows from Scratch?

Almighty1 said:

It might have to do with how recent you are talking about as well and AMD to AMD is different. I was talking more during the older period when different motherboard were using non-Intel/non-AMD chipsets so they all used some third party storage drivers like Promise Technology and some other ones because of the RAID. AMD or Intel is more standardize. And then it depends on the version of Windows too.

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Well, if it's older technology like you say, then all bets are off. God knows what some of those old boards require. All I know is that I have not had an issue in recent memory.

Hello everyone, I have a question,

When you change your motherboard, how can the same Windows 11 installation run, with a different TPM of the motherboard?

johnp said:

Hello everyone, I have a question,

When you change your motherboard, how can the same Windows 11 installation run, with a different TPM of the motherboard?

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I don't believe that the OS signature is in the TPM. I never had issues with mine. I have had to re-input my license though during the last clean install, but I had an issue with my digital license. Once I re-entered my key all was well again, but no issues with the TPM that I could see. However, my TPM is firmware based, not a seperate module in my PC. Maybe that makes a difference.

johnp said:

Hello everyone, I have a question,

When you change your motherboard, how can the same Windows 11 installation run, with a different TPM of the motherboard?

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Catnip said:

I don't believe that the OS signature is in the TPM. I never had issues with mine. I have had to re-input my license though during the last clean install, but I had an issue with my digital license. Once I re-entered my key all was well again, but no issues with the TPM that I could see. However, my TPM is firmware based, not a seperate module in my PC. Maybe that makes a difference.

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Hardware or firmware TPM makes no difference. There are a few things held in the TPM, but the digital licence isn't one of them.

If you use bitlocker the key is in the TPM, so you should decrypt the drive before swapping the motherboard.

If you use a PIN to sign in that too is in the TPM, so you'll need to use your password to sign in the first time after the swap. You can set up the PIN again once you're running on the new motherboard.

The digital licence is stored on Microsoft's activation servers and linked to the hardware ID of the PC. This ID includes the motherboard, so a swap will loose activation. If you signed in with a Microsoft account before the hardware change then the Activation Troubleshooter can restore your digital licence to the new hardware.

Hello Folks thank you for your valuable and informative advice and experiences. I greatly appreciate it as you know more about doing these procedures with newer and modern hardware. It does not matter how old a person is, you can learn something new every day. Cheers and please continue to share your knowledge and experiences with PC's from the past and in today's world of technology.

I am curious about something, what would happy if you take the SSD/HDD or a clone of it containing Windows 10 or 11 and use it on another system, will it actually boot?

Almighty1 said:

I am curious about something, what would happy if you take the SSD/HDD or a clone of it containing Windows 10 or 11 and use it on another system, will it actually boot?

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I can't say it is true for all computers but I did it with two desktops I have. See my Post #20.

What I didn't say in that post was as follows:
Computer #1 has Windows 11 Pro and boots from Disk0 (2TB NVME SSD).
Computer #2 is dual-boot Windows 10 Pro and Windows 7 Home. Windows 10 boots from Disk0 (1TB SATA SSD) and Windows 7 boots from Disk2 (1TB SATA SSD).

Some people have said that if the computers are either both Intel or both AMD then that makes the chances better. I don't know it you can do that if you mix Intel and AMD. Both my computers are AMD but the motherboards are totally different.

Almighty1 said:

I am curious about something, what would happy if you take the SSD/HDD or a clone of it containing Windows 10 or 11 and use it on another system, will it actually boot?

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Generally, yes....

MisterEd said:

I can't say it is true for all computers but I did it with two desktops I have.....

Some people have said that if the computers are either both Intel or both AMD then that makes the chances better. I don't know it you can do that if you mix Intel and AMD. Both my computers are AMD but the motherboards are totally different.

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My System One is running a Windows that started life on an old unsupported laptop (Legacy bios, MBR, Intel based) and migrated (as Windows 10) to a new supported one (UEFI, GPT, AMD based). That's about as extreme a change as you can get. Not only was it a major hardware change but I also had to covert from MBR to GPT along the way.

I did that by first clean installing Windows 10 on the new machine in UEFI mode. Then I deleted its C: partition and restored just the C: partition from the system image of the old Legacy/MBR 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.

I have effectively got exactly the same PC as I had before, just with every part of its hardware upgraded.

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Almighty1 said:

Good to know. I will need to do the same as my only drive 1TB SSD has 18GB left but it can go down to 0GB and require a reboot before it will hit 30GB free again, will probably get a 4TB SSD in the next few weeks after deciding on what to get. As I mentioned, I did try to uninstall a Intel RST driver and it did BSOD until the Windows Diagnostics and Repair somehow fixed it after a few BSODs with the Intel RST which was what it showed after Windows repaired it that was supposedly deleted. It was not a archaic task even back then because it's only a one minute thing to do it before cloning. It's only bad when you cloned first and after replacing all the hardware that you had to put in the old hardware just to fix the problem. Ofcourse sometimes, that is the only way someone will learn something.

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If you're running a modern system with modern gear (no legacy hardware and BIOS is UEFI), no need to uninstall or tweak anything. Just clone and replace.

Also, in all things equal (outside of drive size).... if your OS drive is running fine as is, why would things change with a cloned drive... considering your making an "exact" copy

Almighty1 said:

I am curious about something, what would happy if you take the SSD/HDD or a clone of it containing Windows 10 or 11 and use it on another system, will it actually boot?

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Like everything in life, things happen, but in all my experiences, I've never had it not work. And I've been consistently building since 98.

I'm about the place the OS drive I cloned from my main system and place it in my backup system with dissimilar hardware. Zero doubt it will boot (been there, done that before). Will probably just have to update a few drivers on the backup system.

Thanks @MisterEd, @Bree and @Dru2 - I had that question because in my recent case, I was thinking maybe it's time to invest in a new notebook instead of a replacement motherboard and CPU (the CPU appears to be soldered on) but if I did that, I would still need to figure out what I had installed on the original system so I went the replacement motherboard route first. My other system which this current system replaced in 2019, I still haven't migrated things yet as usually I use the Start Menu, Programs list for reference which is the easy part but then personal files are all over the place, I'll probably eventually work on it someday when I actually have a larger SSD as the other machine uses a 2TB SATA 2.5" SSD but I will still need to research the notebook processors to determine what to get. I am just trying to figure out if I am better off with the image or clone route as the former, I will have a copy of the image on another external spinner HDD as a backup but my WinRE image is corrupted because of the motherboard random reboot issue and I meant to build a UUP Dump ISO to do a repair install but the script keeps complaining of things failing because of lack of free space on the current SSD. I have not cloned a drive for probably 19 years or more as the last thing I cloned were 3.5" Western Digital Caviar 250GB EIDE drives. I still have not done an image yet.

As far as uninstalling, that was for a different reason. I was trying to update to a newer version of the Intel RST Drivers. The 18.7 drivers in Device Manager shows up as 18.37 so the newer 18.8 drivers would not install because the version number is lower than 18.37 even though the version is really supposed to be 18.7.