Folks, I built a Haswell computer with a ASUS Z87 mobo. I took my SSD from my ASUS Z77 mobo computer and stuffed it into the new computer. Win8.1 just did a couple of readying devices and booted right up. No need to reinstall Win8. VERY nice surprise.
Thanks for the info. :thumb: Good to hear it works, even it is not the recommended way of implementation. I hope it will work with my installation as well. I currently have an older Gigabyte P35-DS3 board and want to upgrade to an Asrock Z87. Since it took me several month to adjust Windows, I will try this method first before I face the hazard of an annoying installation and adjusting process.
I've done that a few times - even with Windows 7 -- usually it will boot - and most new drivers will be found -- even when I've changed from an AMD based processor to an INTEL one.
Sometimes some drivers will need to be fixed / installed but that's usually a simple process -- a typical case might be you need to update the Video driver or Chipset (or both).
You'll see this on boot if you can't get all the video resolutions. Usually just go into device manager -- look for the devices with a question / exclamation mark against them and simply update device driver -- update manually if computer can't find them like use drivers from the mobo installation disk or whatever.
If you are MOVING the OS or have a VL / Multiple activation version such as Windows Enterprise edition - re-activation should not be a problem - and sometimes you might not even get an activation request.
If there ARE problems you can activate by phone. Don't forget too that Windows 8.1 has changed the restriction about moving the OS from OEM builds -- not sure what they are - you can google etc but I know they've been relaxed a bit compared with previous OS releases.
Jimbo, the new computer did ask me to activate Windows again but I am using the retail version of Win8.1 Pro from Technet, so that went smooth. I did delete a bunch of extra "hidden devices" that were greyed out in Device Manager. Device Manager-View-Show hidden devices. Pretty much everything was duplicated so there was a lot of them. Getting rid of all the grey out devices did no harm at all (that I can tell- computer does not sleep anymore tho).