The answer to life, the universe and how to move an OS!

I image the old Disk 0 (which contains both System C:\ and Programs and data D:\, then boot from my Macrium rescue USB drive and Restore the recent image to the new Disk (in my case, an M2 NVMe). Then shut down, boot into the BIOS, move the new Disk to position 1, save and boot, and then, running from C:\ on the new drive, use Disk Management to wipe (and maybe partition) the old Disk 0, as it's now a data drive. I'm not sure that covers everything, but you get the gist.

Oh, it occurs to me that I've forgotten how I make the new Disk Disk 0, and the old Disk 0 Disk 2. Help would be appreciated on this.

(If they were both just standard SSDs, I'd just physically switch them around in the case, but the new System Disk is M2, so they can't be just switched.)

If i change the hardware - I prefer a Clean OS install - while backing-up only the personal data/settings of given apps where that's necessary (like browser and such). Works/worked 100% all the time. As for cloning, well... 9/10 times might work just fine - while the 1 time it doesn't - it can really foodle your day-up ... like one this guys - just do a google search for:

"cloning OS gone wrong reddit"

If it's the same hardware - sure, even an OS migration is acceptable.

When I moved from M.2 SATA to NVMe, I used a separately powered portable USB3 HDD (3.5 inch 7200rpm) to store an image. I do not use BitLocker. The method that I use (and that I will describe next) fails if BitLocker is enabled.

Disabled Secure Boot option in the UEFI settings, changed the boot order to boot from USB flash drive. This flash drive had already been formatted with Ventoy, and also had a copy of the official Windows 11 installation ISO file from Microsoft already stored on it (that is, a copy of the actual ISO file itself, not the unpacked contents of the ISO file). No Rufus or anything like that. But nowadays I also keep a copy of my WinRE.wim file stored on it, so that I can just use this addon to boot straight into that, because it boots a wee bit faster than the Windows 11 installation ISO does. This is just so I can still open an elevated command prompt (by pressing Shift + F10) and run diskpart, bcdedit, etc. whenever I need to. On this same flash drive, this file:
When I create an image of my Windows partition, if there's enough free space on the SSD, normally I just pick a destination folder that is located on the same SSD as my Windows partition─the 'OS drive'. The image creation goes a lot faster this way (compared to using the portable HDD anway). Unlike with Macrium Reflect, it really doesn't even matter if this destination folder is located on the actual C: partition itself.

And no futzing around with moving the user profile and/or all personal files to a separate partition. Instead, I just pick the files/folders to be excluded from image. Those had already been backed up on external storage with FastCopy. It takes literally five seconds to choose the exclusions. It's so much easier than cake.

While the image of my Windows partition is being created, I tick the Verify image checkbox. Once the image file of my Windows partition has been created (and verification went successful), normally I change the UEFI settings back, and I boot back into Windows before I copy the image file onto external storage with FastCopy. But my laptop only has a single M.2 socket so, because the goal was to replace the old 512GB M.2 SATA SSD with a new NVMe SSD, I used an external storage device to transfer my image this time.

To make Windows recognize the new NVMe drive and be able to boot from it, I opened the elevated command prompt so that I could then copy the boot files from the Windows folder onto the EFI partition, booted Windows into Safe Mode to let it detect NVMe, and finally my Windows 11 could boot normally again. Installed Sam(e)sung Magician, ran the firmware update. Danced around in circles, and called it a day.

@hdmi

Wow!! Thanks for giving me that food for thought. I’m developing quite a flowchart for what should be a fairly simple project. The help I’ve gotten here has been amazing. I’m facing this hardware-plus-software operation with confidence today.

I just restored an image that was a clean install 2 months ago and I always just update the programs installed or remove anything no longer needed with Revo Uninstaller Pro then manually delete leftovers from the OS and registry then make a new current image with the changes called "Fresh Install". I then restore this newly created image to the new drive or the current drive as it has no accumulated browsing history or use.

The image was restored to a unformatted Samsung 980 Series - 500GB PCIe Gen3. X4 NVMe 1.4 - M.2 Internal SSD with Macrium Home using a Ventoy USB, The only thing I had to change was to use the "shrink or extend to fill the target disk" option in Macrium to fit the new disk. The new Samsung 980 500 GB replaced a generic 512GB PCIe® 3.0 NVMe™ M.2 SSD that came with the Laptop.