this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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askchapo

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Can I clone my Windows installation off my aging SATA SSD onto a new NVMe M.2 drive with a Linux boot device? (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by TheronGuard@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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I presume the answer is "yes I can" but I just want to make sure I've got the process right.

The 240GB SSD I've got my Windows 10 installation on just turned 5 years old, and from what I understand 5-6 years is where they start to reach the end of their lifespan. Also, between my Windows install and modern game sizes 240GB is pretty tiny and I haven't been really been able to put much on it anyway.

The motherboard I upgraded to a year ago has two M.2 slots and I'm thinking of getting a 1TB NVMe drive and cloning my OS onto it. In 2022 I had trouble with faulty hardware corrupting Windows several times and during that time I made an AntiX boot device for troubleshooting that I've still got.

I assume the process would be

  • Install M.2 drive
  • Boot into AntiX
  • Use the disk manager utility (can't remember what it was called) to clone the contents of the SATA SSD onto the M.2 drive
  • Open BIOS and change the boot drive to the M.2
  • Boot to Windows

Would the M.2 drive be recognised as the new C: drive or will Windows get confused and give me trouble?

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[–] unperson@hexbear.net 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Windows will not boot because it will be missing boot-time nvme drivers. I don't remember how I solved this.

On top of that the bootloader will be confused and you need to reinstall it with arcane commands in the command prompt of a Windows recovery environment.

The built-in Windows recovery environment is also missing drivers and has a confused bootloader, so you must use a USB drive.

Windows needs a propietary app to make a USB drive from their ISO, because there's a file in the ISO that's bigger than 4 GB and the installer only supports FAT32 on USB drives. dding doesn't work. Alternative solution: delete this file (it's install.wim, you only need it if you actually want to install) and copy contents of the ISO to a FAT32 partition.

The only diagnostic you will get for any of these issues is a blue screen that sayw "sowwy I can't boot :("

When I came upon this it took me like 6 hours to figure out how to convince Windows to boot.