Can I transfer an SSD from laptop to desktop PC ?

facade

It will probably boot, pick up the drivers for it's new home, and it ought to activate itself if the motherboard had an active licence for the same version of windows.

I've swapped drives before from machine to machine, some just boot others won't. I think it is something to do with whether secure boot is enabled or not, but I don't understand why.

Vitor

IMHO booting from a drive taken from a laptop is likely 50:50 depending on the age of the laptop and desktop, e.g. one might to set to EUFI BIOS with secure boot so the drive would have been formatted using GPT layout.

If it does boot and has drivers to connect to the internet, very likely the Windows licensing will need to be sorted as the key could be baked into the laptop's BIOS by the manufacturer and Windows will 'phone home' as it'll detect the changed CPU/mobo.

All in all, easier to setup a boot SSD/NVMe for the desktop and use the transferred 1TB as a data disk. NB chances are you'll need to use Windows Admin mode to change the permissions on the /user folders(s) to access the data. That's easy, not related to encryption. 

Newcad

Personally I wouldn't expect it to boot on a computer which has totally different hardware (different BIOS/UEFI, different CPU, RAM, Graphics card, etc, etc).

But you can put it in a drive enclosure/caddy or connect it by a SATA-USB cable and transfer all the data such as documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, and so on off it to a new computer. Such enclosures and cables are pretty cheap, see your local computer shop or Amazon.

Once you have ssfely copied the data off it then reformat it and use as an external drive.

HillStreetBlues

Newcad said:

Personally I wouldn't expect it to boot on a computer which has totally different hardware (different BIOS/UEFI, different CPU, RAM, Graphics card, etc, etc).

But you can put it in a drive enclosure/caddy or connect it by a SATA-USB cable and transfer all the data such as documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, and so on off it to a new computer. Such enclosures and cables are pretty cheap, see your local computer shop or Amazon.

Once you have ssfely copied the data off it then reformat it and use as an external drive.

Since Win10 at least I've never had an issue taking a clone of my PC drive and using it in a laptop. Normally have to install some drivers manually and can be a PITA to get it activated.