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Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
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Topic: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives... (Read 4022 times)
zpyder
Posts: 6,946
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Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
on:
January 08, 2016, 13:23:22 PM
So I have a new christmas laptop.
It has a 128gb M.2 PCIe SSD drive. And a 1tb "classic" hard drive.
I want to swap the 128gb drive for a 512gb drive.
What are my options, except for reinstalling everything...which might be a challenge in terms of the laptop being pre-installed with windows and not having the recovery partition on the new drive?
I thought I could get a USB caddy for the new drive, and use a cloning program to just copy everything across. That would be the easiest solution, except it looks like none of the caddies support PCIe type drives, only the SSD M.2 drives.
Can I clone the SSD drive contents to either the 1tb drive, or a USB hard drive, replace it with the 512gb version, and then boot from the clone copy to transfer it all back? Is there a better solution I'm just not seeing?
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Clock'd 0Ne
Clockedtastic
Posts: 10,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #1 on:
January 08, 2016, 18:16:30 PM
There are plenty of disk clone utilities out there that would do exactly what you want and adjust the destination partition size accordingly (i.e they don't have to match), Acronis do a decent one though I forget what it's called, but I used it and it will save a disk image to any device, network, etc. It might also be worth checking out the software of the SSD manufacturer as a few do disk clone software of their own designed to get you up and running fast with a new replacement boot disk.
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zpyder
Posts: 6,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #2 on:
January 08, 2016, 20:00:56 PM
I've looked at the manufacturers own clone utility, annoyingly it only works on the assumption you have the drive to clone to already connected. As I only have the one m. 2 port, it doesn't work as it won't clone to a none sad drive.
Presumably if I go down the route of using something like acronis, I'll need to clone to a removable drive, install the new m. 2 drive, and do a clean windows install before being able to restore the clone image?
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Clockedtastic
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #3 on:
January 08, 2016, 21:29:31 PM
It's Acronis True Image, the latest versions have a boot disk mode where you can create a disk and clone the disk without needing to boot into windows, so you could stick that on a USB pen or suchlike, swap the drives over and be well away.
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zpyder
Posts: 6,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #4 on:
January 09, 2016, 17:15:03 PM
So I cloned the drive, as well as making a full drive backup. Created a USB recovery drive too.
Used the recovery drive to access acronis. Everything seemed to run smoothly. However, once it finished and shut down, when I rebooted I first got a boot device inaccessible bsod, and then the laptop went into a boot loop, turning on, showing lenovo, and then restarting. Couldn't get into the bios by pressing f2 and it wouldn't boot off of the USB stick.
Put the old ssd in and it's working fine. Going to try the other recovery disk options.
I don't know if I have the wrong m.2 key type, looks like the original drive was a b+m and the one I bought is m only, though I think it should work... Unless would it cause issues if the origins drive was sata and the new drive pcie type?
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zpyder
Posts: 6,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #5 on:
January 09, 2016, 17:18:34 PM
MZ-HP5120 SM951= new drive
MZ-NLN1280 PM871 = old drive
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knighty
Posts: 6,951
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #6 on:
January 09, 2016, 20:55:33 PM
if it's not getting past the bios then it has to be a hardware problem
if it was software it would at least get to the booting from/pick boot device/etc... screen
no idea about b+m vs m tho
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zpyder
Posts: 6,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #7 on:
January 09, 2016, 23:48:19 PM
I've since tried doing a fresh install using the windows 10 installation media USB download. Again, Al goes well until the system needs to reboot, and then the same loop.
Left wondering if it's a faulty drive, ebuyer sent it in a jiffy bag... Or if it's some kind of driver issue, as I don't seem to be able to get a driver download as it's an oem drive.
And frustratingly I've dropped the tiny black screw that holds the drive in, onto a deep pile rug,. Going to have to try hoovering it tomorrow and hoping it sucks it up!
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zpyder
Posts: 6,946
Hero Member
Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #8 on:
January 10, 2016, 00:27:14 AM
Ok, here's an interesting update...
Tried doing a fresh install again. This time it actually worked. However when I rebooted, same problem with the loop.
This time though, I took the drive out, booted, powered off, put drive in, booted and checked the bios to see the drive was listed. Saved and exited...it worked again.
I'm wondering if my initial attempt at doing the clone restore did something to the drive boot record or something, and my attempts since then haven't updated/corrected the mistake.
Is there a way to completely reformat a drive and do a fresh install? Doing it from the windows installation media showed that the drive was empty, but acronis listed two small (<1gb) partitions in addition to the main empty one...
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zpyder
Posts: 6,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #9 on:
January 10, 2016, 11:42:15 AM
Tried using command prompt to fix the MBR, didn't work, same thing. Also did another install and this time it listed 5 partitions on the drive, deleted them all, same thing.
Think I'll return the drive and get something that's documented to be compatible with the laptop, hopefully Ebuyer will accept that it is "faulty" even if it is more of an incompatibility thing...
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Clockedtastic
Posts: 10,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #10 on:
January 13, 2016, 07:33:24 AM
I've never known anything like that before! Hopefully they will swap it, I can't see why not.
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M3ta7h3ad
Posts: 5,822
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #11 on:
February 16, 2016, 17:19:20 PM
Uuid.
It's the uuid.
When you're booting this disk, its never with the other connected at the same time is it?
Windows assigns a uuid to a disk and if two disks have the same uuid, it gets f**ked up if they are both in the system at the same time. There is a way to save it using cmd line tools in recovery mode (have a Google) but yeah key thing is never ever mount the drive partitions simultaneously in the same system.
I clone drives regularly for work and have had this happen several times I use easeus on USB stick to avoid the conflict by cloning from the easeus software.
Edit: ah I read some more posts. It's not the Uuid. It's either uefi problems or hardware fail, If its during post checks. Uuid problems happen while windows tries booting.
Last Edit: February 16, 2016, 17:21:34 PM by M3ta7h3ad
#187;
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zpyder
Posts: 6,946
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Re: Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...
Reply #12 on:
February 21, 2016, 22:09:58 PM
Figured I should post what happened in the end.
After Ebuyer gave me an RMA number, I found that disabling UEFI boot, and enabling legacy mode, "fixed" the problem.
Think it came down to messing up the drive partition so that I converted the GPT to MBR or something. I'm not fussed about not using UEFI, so I'm happy now. Turns out though that there are a small number of people with the Lenovo Y700 and similar issues with these Samsung M.2 SSDs.
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Upgrading to a larger SSD without reinstalling everything...M.2 PCIe drives...