SOLVED Updating Windows 10 from an old Windows 7 Boot Drive

[Scotty-B]

Hello all,
I have recently had a Windows 7 machine get soaked with salt water and fry. The only thing salvageable was the boot drive. The second drive (D) did not make it. I just bought a new computer with Windows 10 installed and am searching high and low on how to pick up where I left off by transferring all my old accounts, files, settings, and installed software from the old Windows 7 boot drive (C) to the boot drive on the new machine. My backup images were on the (D) drive of the old machine, so I do not have any backup files.

I have the Win 7 hard drive connected to the new Win 10 machine as an external drive and can see all the files on it. In the Win 10 Control Panel there is the tool to 'Backup And Restore (Windows 7)'. My issue is that the tool is looking for a system image to update from. I tried removing my Win 10 hard drive and replacing it with the Win 7 drive, booting and creating a backup image to do the job from, but the computer will not boot without errors probably because of the vastly different hardware on the new computer from the old (Old: 2013 model Toshiba Qosmio, New: Alienware 17). I reinstalled the Win 10 drive into the computer and have again plugged the Win 7 drive into it through a USB adapter as an external drive.

Can anyone help me?

 

[Wolfie]

Hi Scotty,

have you considered cloning the drive first?.

http://clonezilla.org/

 

[Scotty-B]

Could you elaborate? I already have the drive completely accessible and configured the BIOS to boot from it. It fails every time it tries to boot. It gets most of the way then craps out. I just need some way to simulate a system backup or create a system backup so Windows can pull the needed files out of the backup file.

If I’m misunderstanding the process, please let me know.

 

[Grizzly]

I do not understand your problem. You said you can see all the files on the Win7 drive. If you want to transfer your files to the new drive, just copy and paste them. Of course any programs that you had on the old drive need to be re-installed on the new one.
Since your old drive won't boot all the way, I think there may be damage to that drive as well. You might want to run the Seatools over it to see if there actually are bad sectors or something similar wrong with it...

 

[Bighorn]

Updating Windows 10 from an old Windows 7 Boot Drive

Nearly always an update to an OS has to be run from within that OS. If not booted into the OS to be updated the update routine won't be able to find all the things it needs.

 

[Wolfie]

HI Scotty,

cloning was just an option on the spur of the moment, copy and paste as per @Grizzly's suggestion is also good.

Look at the following link at ways to back up your data and replace the drive with a new one (or 2nd hand one) is what I would do as you might well have a failing drive and risk losing all your data if it isn't already backed-up!.

https://www.howtogeek.com/242428/whats-the-best-way-to-back-up-my-computer/

 

[Scotty-B]

Resolved.
I found a buddy with a Win7 machine, swapped my drive into it, booted it up and made a proper recovery backup through Windows Backup. I copied the backup folder onto the new computer and ran the 'Backup and Restore (Windows 7)' from the control panel and it moved almost everything over to as I had it before.

My research showed that Win7 is quite specific to how it sees hardware and how it boots into it compared to other operating systems. The drive wouldn't even boot onto an old computer from the Vista era. Weird, but that was the way it was.

Thank you everyone who tried to assist.