Recovering systems with OEM partitions

You can recover a BIOS-based system with an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partition to a BIOS or UEFI destination machine.

Note: A “System” label appears on an OEM partition on the Select Source and Destination Volumes page in the restore wizard.

When restoring a protected (source) system with an OEM partition to a BIOS destination machine, the OEM partition must be restored or the system will not boot up. The OEM partition must be restored to the start of a destination machine disk.

When restoring a protected (source) system with an OEM partition to a UEFI destination machine, the OEM volume is not required for booting and does not have to be restored.

If you restore a system with an OEM operating system license to dissimilar hardware, the system might boot but you will not be able to log in to the system without activating Windows. This occurs because OEM licenses are not transferable. When the restore process finishes, contact Microsoft to activate the Windows license.