Can I clone my Windows installation off my aging SATA SSD onto a new NVMe M.2 drive with a Linux boot device?
Can I clone my Windows installation off my aging SATA SSD onto a new NVMe M.2 drive with a Linux boot device?
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?
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'sinstall.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.
I think I read somewhere (hexbear?) that a windows installation will (may?) wipe the whole drive or fuck up the boot loader. Something like that.
Also why not just do a clean install anyway? Move the documents and stuff to a separate drive. You can create a fresh install image pretty easily
I don't really feel like reinstalling every program I have and meticulously copying over all my profiles and settings. Already had to go through that several times last year.
It honestly is really good to reinstall your OS once a year, especially if using windows.
It's a pain but you can use scripting to make it easier if you are up to it.