Cloning a drive with Win 8 OS

[slicksilver]

Hello all

I recently availaled the $40 Win 8 upgrade offer and installed the OS on my existing SSD. I quickly ran out of space and got a new Samsung SSD 840 Pro drive. I plan to clone the drive using Acronis True Image. Question is after the cloning is done, will windows detect a change in the drive's hardware id and ask me to activate again or prompt me to buy a new license?

 

[ViRGE]

It will know the hard drive is different. But it's hard to say whether it would care; I would guess most likely not.

 

[corkyg]

I did it, and there was no hiccup. Either drive boots, loads and runs without any activation problem. Maybe it is because the drives are swapped in a trayless EZ_Swap 4 rack? The rack stays the same. Somethings don't read through that little fence.

 

[JackMDS]

One change that is Not Motherboard usually leaves the activation as is.

Use a Boot TI and image the whole Drive to an external Drive. Then Ghost the Image to the new SSD.

 

[PingSpike]

Isn't upgrade basically the same as retail? I thought it didn't care if the hardware changed with that version.

 

[Raincity]

One change that is Not Motherboard usually leaves the activation as is.

Use a Boot TI and image the whole Drive to an external Drive. Then Ghost the Image to the new SSD.

I am not sure if this is the case with MS activation 3.0 now. I know if you swap out the boot drive, Office 2013 will not run or reactivate without obtaining a new installation ID from MS.