Avoid a reinstall
I was inspired by the Hydra Mini ITX Chassis to go out and build a system to replace my three-year-old setup. However, having only recently reinstalled Windows 11 from scratch, I’m not looking forward to going through the same process again so soon. Is there any way I can avoid what feels like a colossal waste of time?
Travis S Gardner
APC Responds: Given your reinstall is relatively new, you’ll probably get away with fitting the hard drive to your new PC and simply booting from it. In our experience, you’ll likely encounter several reboots, driver updates, and potentially one or two blue screens of death before things hopefully settle down. You’ll also need to run through the activation troubleshooting wizard (Settings > System > Activation) to transfer your digital license, but it’s straightforward enough.
recommends taking a full drive image before you begin using a tool like Hasleo Backup Suite (), so you can roll back if the new) user, you can go one step further: take a full backup of your drive, create rescue media, and boot from that after building your new PC. You should see an option marked ‘ReDeploy restored image to new hardware’ under the Existing Backups tab. Select this, and follow the prompts – for a guide to how it works, visit and search for ‘redeploy’.
