Morning all So i want to replace the NVMe drive that the OS is on in my laptop with a larger and faster drive. My laptop has space for three NVMe drives in total so i was thing il just put the new drive into a slot, copy the OS and then format the old OS drive as spare. So what is the best and more free 9if possible) software to accomplish this. Recommendations by use rather than just hearsay if possible please. Thanks
macrium reflect though any partition cloning tool will do the job, nvme requires gpt/uefi boot in general which doesn't have the same problems as mbr did with needing an active boot sector.
Good old Clonezilla also fits the bill. Like free software. Although, truth to be said, Macrium has a GUI whereas Clonezilla plain interactive CLI
When I upgraded my NVMe I used Acronis TI 2021 to clone the 512GB to the new 2TB, and have it expand the OS partition to the extra space.
I did the cloning using the Recovery Media, since I was cloning the boot / OS drive. Interestingly, I tried doing it while in Windows to output to a USB NVMe port, but the result wouldn't boot properly, so I installed it into the 2nd m.2 port and used the recovery media to clone, which worked perfectly.
I used Acronis True Image for a while, but recently switched to AOMEI, mainly because they have a lifetime key.
Acronis WD Edition If you have a WD drive, you can probably get it for free. Perfect substitute for Windows Image Backup which wont work with pcie NVME. I went from 40gb boot SSD to 256gb boot NVME very easily (took maybe 15 minutes tops).
First you need the Recovery Media, which you make in Acronis TI and use a USB stick. The app creates a Windows PE partition with the software which is bootable. Then have the 2 drives installed, and make sure you can recognize the 2 drives from name and size, as they won't match the usual drive letters. From Acronis, just select Clone Drive, and go through the prompts. There is an Auto option, tho I prefer to select my options. The Auto option is smart enough to figure out what you want and will resize the OS part for you. I bet if I used the Recovery Software from the get-go, the USB NVMe device probably would have worked fine. I think Windows protected access to the Boot part, and Acronis 2021 hasn't been updated for Win 11 22H2. Not going to pay for a yearly subscription just to get that update.
I'm on the fence of migrating from acronis's WD edition to something that does the same job without all the annoying shell extensions, i just need something that has a bootable environment image and is able to mount the backup images as a folder if i ever need to grab anything from one without fully restoring the disk.
Can i copy the OS to an NVMe drive that is in an enclosure and connected via USB4? So i dont have to swap around drives. Thanks
