SSD Upgrade

[Patrick Hoppe]

Hey Guys, 

I'm having issues upgrading my SSD in my Lenovo Yoga 720. I purchased a Samsung Evo 970 Plus 500 GB to replace the stock 128 gig m.2 sata ssd. Since there is only one hard drive slot in the motherboard cloning was my only option. And I've tried it. Like 10 times with both free software such as CloneZilla and with paid software such as Acronis True Image. I have not been able to get past the windows bluescreen with the error message "Inaccessible boot drive" after installing the cloned drive inside the laptop.I have been cloning with the Samsung in an external usb-c NVME enclosure and I am quite certain at this point, after 8 hours of troubleshooting, that the clone isn't the issue. I know this because I have been able to boot from the external enclosure with the clone on it from another machine. I have tried what feels like everything from changing settings in BIOS to messing around with renaming the hard drive partitions from command prompt. I am running out of options and patience. HELP

[BigDamn]

Have you tried switching your SATA interface between AHCI and IDE? (Should be AHCI, but try IDE if you haven't). Also, is secure boot disabled? If not, disable it.

[Turtle Rig]

1 hour ago, Patrick Hoppe said:

Hey Guys, 

I'm having issues upgrading my SSD in my Lenovo Yoga 720. I purchased a Samsung Evo 970 Plus 500 GB to replace the stock 128 gig m.2 sata ssd. Since there is only one hard drive slot in the motherboard cloning was my only option. And I've tried it. Like 10 times with both free software such as CloneZilla and with paid software such as Acronis True Image. I have not been able to get past the windows bluescreen with the error message "Inaccessible boot drive" after installing the cloned drive inside the laptop.I have been cloning with the Samsung in an external usb-c NVME enclosure and I am quite certain at this point, after 8 hours of troubleshooting, that the clone isn't the issue. I know this because I have been able to boot from the external enclosure with the clone on it from another machine. I have tried what feels like everything from changing settings in BIOS to messing around with renaming the hard drive partitions from command prompt. I am running out of options and patience. HELP

I hope you used Samsung Migration ........ But I don't think you can on laptop... its a bad clone or call it what you want.

[mr moose]

Does the lenovo support the type of drive you bought (NVME or sata)? 

 

What is the exact model yoga you have (year, serial etc)

[Patrick Hoppe]

49 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Does the lenovo support the type of drive you bought (NVME or sata)? 

 

What is the exact model yoga you have (year, serial etc)

I believe it supports NVMe because the BIOS recognized recognized it but was still unable to boot from it. It's a 2018 Lenovo Yoga 720 121kb

 

51 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Does the lenovo support the type of drive you bought (NVME or sata)? 

 

What is the exact model yoga you have (year, serial etc)

 

[Patrick Hoppe]

1 hour ago, BigDamn said:

Have you tried switching your SATA interface between AHCI and IDE? (Should be AHCI, but try IDE if you haven't). Also, is secure boot disabled? If not, disable it.

@BigDamn the only option in the BIOS is AHCI. This Laptop has a really skimpy BIOS. And yes, I've tried with secure boot disabled 

[mr moose]

According to Lenovo that model originally had sata ssds in them.  I am wondering if windows has a problem because you have put a sata windows image onto an NVME drive?

 

This might be clutching at straws but I see no obvious reason why it isn't working. 

[NineEyeRon]

I cloned an ancient HDD onto a brand new (by 10 years) SSD for a Mac using free (reputable) software.

 

If that worked then anything should!

 

I do think changing away from SATA would be an issue, esp if the machine can’t boot from NVME or an obscure setting needs changing to do so.

 

A 500GB sata SSD is the idea upgrade if space is what you are after, otherwise I would leave it and get a big 2.5in SSD for games and programs.

[IntMD]

10 hours ago, Patrick Hoppe said:

-snip-

Out of interest, do you actually have anything on your old SSD that you can't just reinstall pretty quickly or copy over from your enclosure? If you haven't, just do a fresh windows 10 install and then reinstall any software and copy over anything personal you want from your old drive.

[Lipe123]

This is a dumb question but have you tried to do the startup repair on the cloned drive with a bootable windows usb disk? Often times it fixes the inaccessible boot device.

 

If that doesn't work then modify your startup settings to legacy and boot into safe mode, go to device manager and make sure the new drive is added and installed. then reboot.

It's complicated kinda to change but there are loads of guides on how to modify the windows boot loader using bcdedit I think or bcdboot to enable the boot menu to appear by pressing F8 like win7 used to do.

[Patrick Hoppe]

3 hours ago, Lipe123 said:

This is a dumb question but have you tried to do the startup repair on the cloned drive with a bootable windows usb disk? Often times it fixes the inaccessible boot device.

 

If that doesn't work then modify your startup settings to legacy and boot into safe mode, go to device manager and make sure the new drive is added and installed. then reboot.

It's complicated kinda to change but there are loads of guides on how to modify the windows boot loader using bcdedit I think or bcdboot to enable the boot menu to appear by pressing F8 like win7 used to do.

I've looked into solutions like this but unfortunately the bios on this laptop doesnt support Legacy

[Patrick Hoppe]

9 minutes ago, Patrick Hoppe said:

I've looked into solutions like this but unfortunately the bios on this laptop doesnt support Legacy

I've also been trying to use the startup repair but the issue is that 9 times out of 10 windows gets hung up before even giving me that option 

[Patrick Hoppe]

Good News! I was able to get it up and running after remaking the clone. This isn't because the clone worked, I still got an inaccessible boot drive error. However, this time Windows diagnostic made it far enough to give me access to their advanced recovery tools and I chose to reset the PC while keeping my files. I decided to give it a shot and sure enough, after it had finished installing a clean copy of windows, it booted right into windows as normal. So I had to reinstall programs but It wasn't near the nightmare it would have been if I had just gone from a clean install of windows to start with. Thanks for your insight!