Peter, My understanding of the upgrade is as yours, MS identifies your hardware once installed , I did exactly what you propose on my laptop, I cloned the HDD then did the upgrade on the new HDD. Once installed it's possible to start afresh and re-install without the baggage that comes across with an upgrade. In my case at least the w10 upgrade had already downloaded in the background and was already on the HDD, a simple process to create an install CD for future use. Description of iso creation from the background download
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