Moving a multiboot systemto dissimilar hardware

J

jpaquette

Distinguished Member
I use EasyBCD to multiboot my main work machine at home (Vista 32, Vista 64, XP, and Ubuntu). I also use Acronis to image my system drive. I note that Acronis now offers its Universal Restore product with its home version. Not long ago I used the commercial version of this product to migrate across dissimilar hardware configurations.

I am having a hard time seeing, however, how one would be able to restore all systems in the multiboot system using this product. At best, it seems to me, one would be able to get back into the system from which the regular Acronis backups are made. Does anyone have any ideas about how one could move a multiboot configuration say from one motherboard to another—especially in the situation where a motherboard fails with no warning?


Thanks for this!
 
I've had no problem shuffling W7 Vista and XP from one HDD to another and keeping my multi-boot alive (with paragon disk copy).
Your main problem in moving to a new mobo will be if any of your OSs are OEM keys.
Windows activation will fail and MS will not validate your key on new hardware. The licence doesn't belong to you (like a retail copy), it belongs to the hardware it was supplied with, or first installed on if you are an OEM self-builder like me.
 
None OEM

Thanks for this reassurance. It turns out that, by chance, all the systems on my main work machine are retail rather than OEM. Your message, however, still leaves me wondering what I would do if the mobo failed suddenly and unexpectedly and I chose to use the occasion to upgrade the mobo.
 
The cloned systems would all need reactivating, but that should be fine. At the most you'll need to phone the free MS number and get an authorisation code, telling them that you've moved to new hardware. The validation on the new mobo automatically invalidates the copy on the old hardware to prevent you from creating multiple OSs for one fee. (the old copy would continue to run, but accessing WUD with it would flag it as a "pirate" copy)
Retail copies are yours for life and can be moved to new hardware as often and as many times as you like, provided there's only ever one working OS per licence fee.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top