Updating Intel to AMD hardware always used to be fraught, usually ending in a new clean install and all sorts of licencing shenanigans.
I have a 6yo Celeron G1820 on a Gigabyte B75 mobo in with a broken motherboard. Quite unusual in itself in that symptoms over the phone were classic HDD starting to fail (diagnosed as a virus by the customer even though scans were all clean). First thing was the Ethernet was dead, updating the drivers didn’t help, there being no hardware to drive! Some USB ports showing the same sort of issue when I plugged in a USB WiFi adapter. Shut down meant reboot and turning off at the wall.
Hmm, the BIOS seemed quite happy all was well and a reset didn’t change anything. I did swap out the memory sticks just in case, not that I could see how they would affect things. A different PSU also didn’t change things. An Ubuntu live had the same issues so it must be the motherboard.
So, time for my now “light use” go-to, an MSI A320M-A PRO MAX board with an Athlon 3000G and 8GB ram with a NAND NVMe; in this case a WD Blue 512GB.
She has tons of software, some now unobtainable, configured exactly how she wants it. A clean install would be a real PITA so I thought lets see if we can avoid it. I used ToDo to make a system backup to an external drive, which I would have done anyway. Hardware replaced, old HDD to one side, boot from the ToDo recovery USB and restore the backup to the new NVMe.
W10 Home booted just fine and within minutes had all the hardware sorted out. Bloody hell! One problem, activation had kicked in as the hardware changes were too much. Got on E-Bay and for a fiver got a W10 Pro key specifically meant for upgrades (many are clean install only). It was an instant delivery job, I followed the instructions and 2 reboots and less than 5 minutes later we now have a happily activated W10 Pro machine.
Even though the old WD Blue spinner is 6yo it passes all the diagnostics so it’s back in, reformatted and used as a target for regular backups.
.
