Hi @ Wilders Grateful for any suggestions of freeware that will carry out BMR disimilar hardware on Windows (10) PC's Prefer something that's easy to use. Thanks Terry
You usually should not need to specifically do a restore to dissimilar hardware. Windows is smart enough to see its running on different hardware and, as a result, will delete drivers for devices which are not in the new system and install any drivers for new hardware which it is able to. Whenever I replace my main computer, I take the SSD from my old system and put it in the new one, and it boots and works fine. I had issues once, where I was getting blue screens on the new system, as my Windows install was badly corrupted and Windows was unable to remove the old drivers which were no longer needed. In this case, I was able to fix the issue by doing a restore to dissimilar hardware using AOMEI Backupper Pro. But this was a highly unusual situation.
I don't know any freeware softwares that can do that. I can recommend Macrium Reflect Pro(ReDeploy feature) as seen in this Guide I think Macrium does have more options (thus more compatible) than AOMEI Pro when restoring to dissimilar hardware.
Roger has had better luck than I've had. I restored images rather than swapped drives but that shouldn't have made a difference. If I let the restored OS boot on the new computer it wouldn't load into Win10. If I then uninstalled drivers from the non loading system it still wouldn't load into Win10. I had to restore the OS image and uninstall drivers before the first boot. Then it would load into Win10.
That's interesting you've had that experience. I've taken hard drives or SSDs from one computer and put them into a different computer, a number of times, with it only failing in the one case I've mentioned. What should happen on the first boot on different hardware, is that when Windows 10 boots, you will get a message along the lines of that it is configuring devices, and it will sort out any driver issues. Windows XP did not do this, which would often lead to blue screen when incompatible drivers were loaded at boot, although it was sometimes possible to fix this. But with Vista and later releases of Windows, I've found that Windows does a very good job of handling different hardware. A few years ago I acquired a laptop which came with no hard drive and only used tiny ZIF hard drives which are hard to find these days. I was able to a buy a used one from China on eBay. When I put it in my laptop and powered it on, it booted to a Chinese language install of Vista.
