A question about moving my c drive.

[TheRealAlpha2]

Okay, so my last question got a bunch of views, but not a single comment, so let me tighten the focus a bit.

I have an Elitedesk 800 g1 small form factor computer. I want to take the C drive (as well as the other drives) from that computer and move it to a 800 g1 tower. What potential issues if any should I be weary of?

As it stands, I've read there may be a need for a driver reinstall and possible an issue with my windows 10pro product key not being in the bios. The sff was a refurb while the tower is planned to be a completely blank slate, bare bones machine with no hard drive or cpu (which I plan to move over from the sff.) Potentially the solution would be to enter the product code found on the sticker from the sff, can anyone confirm this to be correct? or would there be other issues?

[BeemerBiker]

should boot up fine

Did the tower come with a COA?  If win7 or 8 then activate win10 using the 7 or 8 key from the COA.

If freedos or linux then you may need to obtain a win10 license since you are not replacing a defective motherboard.

If you put a used 800 G1 motherboard into an atx case you may be able to use the HP OEM win7 or 8 license key even if no COA was provided.  You will have to check the bios for the existence of an SLIC of version 2 or 2.1

and then first install clean win7x64 (or 😎 and use win7 or win8 OEM key, then upgrade to 10..  Good luck finding OEM key and associated SLP license.

[TheRealAlpha2]

For clarification. The old case is a Elitedesk 800 g1 SFF, refurb from amazon which came with Win10 pro (apparently it's specifically labeled as a refurbished license,) while the new case (I plan to buy, I haven't gotten yet from ebay) is simply a the larger Tower form factor of the same Elitedesk 800 g1 line which has more room for cooling and hardrive space. It will not have a COA, The new Tower (advertised as a Barebones system) will have the motherboard, a power supply, and cpu cooler while being capable of using the same CPU and ram.

The plan is to move what doesn't exist from the SFF to the Tower and hopefully still use the existing win10 pro activation that the SFF had come with, and then For the older SFF, I have it's original CPU, some ram and a SSD I was planning to install on the old Motherboard and probably run with linux (I could probably buy a cheap Win10 license, but not unless I have to). Avoiding the need for a new installation and having to start from scratch is why I'm wondering if everything can transfer with no issue. I can say that I've tried the command line thing where you check the bios for a Key and it doesn't seem to find it. but I've also used an application called Keyfinder which does find it to confirm the key is the same as the sticker the refurbished SFF came with.

I figured the worst case scenario would be the computer would boot into windows 10 and treat it as an unlicensed/unactivated Windows until you bought a new license. Would it just be easier to swap the SFF mother board to the Tower case? While they're both Elitedesk the documentation for both computers shows the motherboards to be slightly different, but I can't tell if it's so significantly different as to cause problems like fitting my GPU or the IO in the new case afterwards. Or if the Tower Motherboard will fit in the SFF case.

Sorry if I'm being redundant, I just want to make sure anyone reading has all the information.

...Okay, I just took some time to examine pictures of Motherboards from both the SFF and the tower and from the looks of it the only different with the tower version is two or three of extra SATA ports which actually wouldn't be much of an issue for me since I already have a PCIE card in my SFF to add extra SATA ports. So swapping Motherboards might be my solution since the only thing that should look different to the computer at that point is the power supply, and the tower MB should fit the SFF with no issue... theoretically.

[TheRealAlpha2 · Accepted solution]

Success! A follow up to my story, because I always hate finding a thread on a forum that pertains to something I need an answer to and never finding out the conclusion.

I Finally got the new case with mother board and power supply from ebay (the seller I bought it from sent another SFF and then after correcting the mistake by sending a free replacement tower, they then sent a second one! So now I have two pairs of 800 g1 Tower and SFF systems, I have more computer guts than I know what to do with now. Maybe make 2 more old 4th gen computers I guess? But I digress...) I spent a bit more time researching the C drive moving process and as it turns out most people on youtube aren't just swapping drives to PCs of the exact same model line, making my case rare, but in the few instances where people mentioned the idea of moving C drives at all, they say it's hit or miss coming down to the type of Windows install you have or whether you have a Microsoft account. I don't, so since mine is specifically labeled a "refurbished license" on the sticker there was no guarantee it would transfer to the new tower motherboard without incident, so I went with plan B and just swapped motherboard across cases. I did notice some very interesting differences between the two motherboards though and I'm not sure if they will result in problems later, but so far the computer seems to have no complaints in it's new home, I had to remove the low profile bracket from  the PCie sata I used to ad more drives but it at least seems secure enough resting against the closed back of the case without it and everything is operating just as I hoped it would with larger power supply, an extra case fan and room to breathe.

BTW I needed a Y cable adapter to the to connect both fans because there's no second fan connector on the SFF board. The difference between the boards make me question why there are differences between the Tower motherboard  and the SFF motherboard I swapped. The differences made me wonder what the result will be if I try to go forward with turning that into a working second PC with my old cpu, gpu and RAM. Besides the extra  fan connector, the biggest differences I noticed were the extra sata ports my original SFF motherboard doesn't have mentioned in a previous post, but also the addition of a port to add a PCie extender port to the end of the motherboard, and a curiously missing heat sink over a component next to the Sata ports that my original SFF motherboard actually, but none of the spec diagrams ever seem to say what it is. Also a minor difference is that some of the capacitors are a different type as well. Red 271 versus blue 270 on the original motherboard.

Well anyway, I hope this helps someone.