Cloning my system drive

asheenlevrai · May 3, 2021

Hi everyone

I need to clone my Win10 system drive (M.2 AHCI) onto a larger drive (M.2 NVMe) and ultimately remove the old drive and boot from the new one.

The NVMe drive will be ultimately connected via a PCIe AIC (still need to have that one delivered). I guess I could still perform the cloning using an USB->M.2 NVMe adapter that I already have, right? Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'd like to do all this using free (as in beer) software.

AFAIU since it's the system drive I'm dealing with, it might be better/required to boot from another disk (source drive needs to be unmounted for cloning?).

I was thinking of making a bootable Linux on a USB dongle, boot from it and then use DD to clone the AHCI drive onto the (USB-attached) NVMe drive. Then remove the AHCI drive and boot from the (PCIe-attached) NVMe.

Does that make any sense?

Any other recommendation/alternative that would make my life easier?

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Best,

-a-

Skiiwee29 · May 3, 2021

<-- Moved to Storage Devices -->

Kedohawyr · May 4, 2021

Macrium Reflect (free for personal use edition) is the common recommendation and what I use for full system backups and system migrations.

If you can install both drives at once then you don't even need to create a bootable USB. Macrium can clone the current OS drive while it's in use over to another drive. Then you shutdown, take out the old drive and make sure the BIOS is set to the boot from the new drive.

If you can't do that (such as in a laptop with a single M.2 slot) then you can use "Create Rescue Media" in the other tasks menu to create a bootable USB or CD with the software on it. The software can not only clone from one drive to another it can also create image files. So you save an image of your OS drive to some other external storage (USB HDD or NAS), swap the two SSDs and then use the software to restore that image onto the new drive (this also leaves you with a nice backup)