Question about M.2 drives

[ralphlim35]

In my PC, I cheaped out on my M.2 drive that is only sata i think and only has 250 gb. I'm planning to upgrade it soon and into a bigger M.2 with higher speeds and bigger storage. my problem how am i gonna transfer the windows os to the new m.2? and my board only has 1 m.2 slot, should i buy 1 of those pcie to m.2 adapters?

[Skipple]

It's not recommended to clone the OS drive while the drive is in use. You need a second PC in order to be able to do this appropriately. It may be easier just to reinstall Windows from scratch.

[Tetras]

How much of the 250GB has stuff on it? You could just use a small USB flash drive if there's not much on it.

 

Alternative to PCI-E to M.2: USB caddy, which is what Kingston provide with their SSD upgrade kit.

 

If you want to preserve your Windows install, you'd need to use cloning software.

[RONOTHAN##]

8 minutes ago, ralphlim35 said:

my board only has 1 m.2 slot

What board is it? I'd want to make sure that the M.2 slot isn't SATA only.

 

9 minutes ago, ralphlim35 said:

should i buy 1 of those pcie to m.2 adapters?

Personally I'd go the other way and get an M.2 to SATA adapter for your current drive. 

[PDifolco]

13 minutes ago, Skipple said:

It's not recommended to clone the OS drive while the drive is in use. You need a second PC in order to be able to do this appropriately. It may be easier just to reinstall Windows from scratch.

Really I've done it recently on 2 machines without any issue, using a 25 bucks USB NVMe external enclosure and AOMEI Partition assistant, to fully clone the drive (won't work with partition copies on UEFI boot)

[Godlygamer23]

30 minutes ago, Skipple said:

It's not recommended to clone the OS drive while the drive is in use. You need a second PC in order to be able to do this appropriately. It may be easier just to reinstall Windows from scratch.

Last time I cloned a boot drive, the utility made my computer restart before performing the clone process, so the drive wasn't in use anymore by Windows. I've never used a secondary PC for the purpose of cloning a drive, and I don't even think a secondary PC is necessarily going to work due to permission issues that may arise. 

[Skipple]

2 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Last time I cloned a boot drive, the utility made my computer restart before performing the clone process, so the drive wasn't in use anymore by Windows. I've never used a secondary PC for the purpose of cloning a drive, and I don't even think a secondary PC is necessarily going to work due to permission issues that may arise. 

Yes, booting to another OS (ie. Linux portable on USB or something) and cloning it that way would also work, as that's the same thing you are describing. You just can't be using the drive has is cloning.

[Godlygamer23]

2 minutes ago, Skipple said:

Yes, booting to another OS (ie. Linux portable on USB or something) and cloning it that way would also work, as that's the same thing you are describing. You just can't be using the drive has is cloning.

I used a utility(such as MiniTool Partition Wizard) to do it, which was installed on the same drive as the one I was cloning. Point is...you don't really need a secondary PC to do it. 

[ralphlim35]

4 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

What board is it? I'd want to make sure that the M.2 slot isn't SATA only.

 

Personally I'd go the other way and get an M.2 to SATA adapter for your current drive. 

its a MSI B450 GAMING PLUS MAX mother board