Solved Replace M.2 Drives

Looking at Ugreen or Asus Strix at the moment.

Unless you have other plans for the old drives, you can buy two USB enclosures and use the old drives as external drives once you have the new drives setup and working..

BamaInArk said:

Look for a Toolless enclosure on Amazon. Just easier to change drives out. Type C USB is better but some come with multiple cables. Sabrent, Ugreen, etc.

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Yep...there are plenty of options. I paid $20 for a Ugreen one (USB 3.2 10Gbps) although the machine I upgraded is 7 years old...about two years ago I upgraded the original Samsung M.2 Sata to a WD SN770...didn't take too long. I can't remember if I used Minitool or Macrium to clone. I use Hasleo now...it has a "Universal Restore" option that appears to check all hardware before attempting to boot (yes I did have a past scare where a drive wouldn't boot after system image restore).

Three ways to do it:
- Buy an M.2 enclosure and install the new SSD on it and then clone the current into the new drive adjusting only the main partition size. Do it for drive 1 and then for drive 2.
- Install one new drive into the slot of the data M.2 SSD and then clone the current OS drive into the new drive adjusting only the main partition size
Install one new drive into the slot of the OS M.2 SSD, boot from the Macrium rescue drive and then clone the current data SSD into the new. Install both new drives and boot.
- With Macrium create a drive image of both current drives and save on the HDD. Replace current drives with the new ones then boot from the Macrium rescue drive and then load the saved images into the new drives.

Thank you everyone, I've ordered two enclosures to use for the "defunct" drives and I might try using Macrium and create a couple of images to then deploy to the new drives.

antspants said:

Maybe read the posts correctly. In fact it was one post, mine.

The suggestion was install Windows and restore the Macrium image onto it

Takes 5 minutes on my 10yo piece of crap PC, to install windows. Would take me just as long to clone a drive, especially when you’re mentioning buying a cheap enclosure. So by the time you get your cheap enclosure delivered, I have installed Windows 50 times have restored your precious macrium image 50 times to boot.

Pulling drives out, screwing around buying enclosures, yeah, so much faster…

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I wished it was 5 minutes. Did Repair/Upgrade in-place installs of the last few Beta Insiders builds of Windows 11 23H2 and each time, it was somewhere 1 hour or longer... I think I know why you mentioned doing the install first because it is probably for the bcd store, efi partition itself so it will be bootable while the OS itself can use the backed up image.

Almighty1 said:

I wished it was 5 minutes. Did Repair/Upgrade in-place installs of the last few Beta Insiders builds of Windows 11 23H2 and each time, it was somewhere 1 hour or longer... I think I know why you mentioned doing the install first because it is probably for the bcd store, efi partition itself so it will be bootable while the OS itself can use the backed up image.

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Exactly. I'd rather do it that way the first time than find it didn't take when restoring an image from bloated (or any other) imaging software

The thing with cloning to a larger drive is you have to deal with partitioning afterwards. (And that recovery partition if you have one does get in the way of easily extending the C: drive into the unallocated space.
When restoring an image to a bare metal drive, I extend my partitions to the size I want during the restore and let Macrium do it's thing, initialize, format, partition, restore. Even fix boot issues if needed. One and done. I don't have to mess with it anymore.

I thought the partitioning issue wasn't even an issue when Partition Magic and Norton Ghost existed as there are all these non-destructive Partition Utilities available. I think *BSD is probaby the only OSes that doesn't have the non-destructive method of expanding a partition.

antspants said:

Exactly. I'd rather do it that way the first time than find it didn't take when restoring an image from bloated (or any other) imaging software

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That was how I upgraded as in migrating to a new system or building a new system for others... I would clone the drive, this is with XP as I haven't had to do it after that by first changing the Storage Controller back to the Standard IDE to prevent the BSOD on boot and then remove or change the apps, device drivers, etc as it's easier to remove things than having a system that doesn't work from the start.

Yeah, I can’t speak for Macribloat but Hasleo seems to resize the partitions on restore. As long as I have partitions available. One would thing restoring an image to a bear drive would just create the partitions but like I mentioned (somewhere) It doesn’t always play nice when I restore to a bare drive.

Hello!

Excuse me if this has already been suggested, too many posts and I was a little lazy to go through all of them. Disconnect all other disks to avoid any mistakes. Leave only the Windows M.2 disk and the respective new M.2 disk. Copy all the partitions in the order they appear on the new M.2 disk. When you copy the Windows partition (the larger one), right-click on it and change it to a larger size to take all the available disk space minus the required space for the remaining partitions. I don't remember the steps exactly, but you get the idea. Then copy the rest partitions on the new M.2 disk. That's it. Disconnect both M.2 disks and connect the second M.2 and the respective new M.2 disk. Repeat the process, copy all the partitions (if more than one) in the order they appear. Before copying the next partition resize the current to the desired size. If it is a single partition, copy it and then resize it to leave 0 space at the end, so it takes the whole disk. Doing these right and then making sure the new Windows M.2 has higher boot priority should boot into Windows without any issues. I have done it before with SATA disks. I didn't have yet the privilege to install M.2 disks on my own PC.

Have not read every single post so pardon me if this has been said already, but this task could easily be performed with no external drives needed whatsoever.

Nor would it require any additional drives at all aside from the 2 original drives and the drives being used to replace them.

Also, the suggestion of installing a clean copy of Windows before restoring an image is not what I would do. Why would you install an OS only to overwrite it with an image right after you put in all the effort to install an OS?

The transition completed today, i put the two new M.2's in external enclosures and cloned the existing drives with macrium. Swapped old out, new in and Bob's your uncle.
Thanks all for your contributions.

Please mark the thread as solved.