This is intended as a companion service to CrashPlan for securing research data. Thankfully, you can just re-enter your activation key.Acronis serves the purpose of securing valuable settings and configurations of device-connected computers in research. The Windows activation process is designed to make sure you only install that copy of Windows on one PC at a time, so changing a computer’s motherboard–or even some other bits of internal hardware–will result in the Windows system becoming deactivated. If you purchase a retail copy of Windows and install it yourself, things aren’t so bad. These preinstalled versions of Windows are OEM (“original equipment manufacturer”) copies, and are designed to be locked to the hardware they were originally installed on. Microsoft doesn’t want you to be able to move those OEM copies of Windows to another computer. Most people get Windows preinstalled on computers they purchase. Windows activation is another hurdle in the process. RELATED: How Does Windows Activation Work? The Licensing Problem: Windows Activation When Windows boots on different hardware, it doesn’t know how to handle that hardware and won’t boot properly.

The drivers for the storage controller, which allows the motherboard to communicate with the hard disk, are particularly important.

That’s because when you install Windows on a computer, it sets itself up with drivers specific to that computer’s motherboard and chipset.

You may see an error about problems with the “hardware abstraction layer” or “hal.dll”, or it may even blue-screen during the boot process. If you actually try moving a Windows drive to another computer and booting from it–or restoring a Windows system image backup on different hardware–it usually won’t boot properly. RELATED: 8 Backup Tools Explained for Windows 7 and 8

Acronis restore to different hardware