Aurora R12, cloning disk drive and shifting boot drive from SATA HDD to NVMe M.2 SSD

Assuming that works fine, you canplug the SATA drive back in, F12 on boot, go to the one time boot  menu and select the NVME, and then do a clean wipe of the HDD in diskpart.  Be very careful you are booted from the correct drive.  After you wipe the boot partition in the SATA SSD you shouldn't have an issue in the future.  

Select windows boot manager, unplug the 2TB SATA drive, and you should be all set it should boot from the NVME. 

Thanks for the responses. I successfully booted several times off the NVMe several times using F12. After booting onto the NVMe and making sure it worked well, I then fully formatted and re-partitioned the original SSD.

This somehow bricked the Aurora R12 when starting. I now have a wonderful BSOD that says "Your PC/Device needs to be repaired, Error code 0xc000000e".

In addition, "Windows Boot Manager has disappeared as a boot option in the BIOS, with only IPv4 and IPv6 as options.

When you successfully booted, did you make sure to unplug the SATA HDD to verify the PC boots properly with just the NVME installed and not the original HDD?  If so, then you can fix this by unplugging the HDD and the issue was with the formatting of the original HDD.  It didn't get fully wiped.  

Thank you for the response. 

No, I didn't unplug and remove the original SSD to check if it would only boot up on the NVMe as per your suggestion prior to full formatting and I severely regret that.  

Removing HDD doesn't fix the problem and the computer will no longer boot to NVMe via selection by F12.  I still can't understand why the NVMe would suddenly become unbootable, given that the NVMe was humming along fine for awhile after I formatted the SSD and before restarting. 

Trying to boot from win 10 free install/repair media is the next option.

If you didn't try booting without the SATA HDD, and removing the HDD doesn't fix, and selecting the NVME via F12 doesn't work, you can boot from win 10 free install/repair media on a USB drive:  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

It's because when you run the cloned drive with the original installed, you are using the UEFI boot manager. You have to edit the UEFI boot manager to point it to the correct partition and drive to boot from. You cannot do that from within the bios.

If you disconnect the original SATA drive, it should have been able to boot up properly from the cloned NVME drive.

Thank you for the responses.

This issue is now resolved.  For future reference I will post the steps I took below in case anyone wants to try to move their boot drive to a new NVMe SSD and avoid several mistakes I made.  For me, this was a newly shipped R12, so I didn't care about losing any files.

1.  Physically installed the new NVME SSD (of the same capacity as the shipped SATA).

2.  Used Macrium Reflect Free to clone the SATA completely to the new NVMe SSD.

3.  Restart and Press & hold F12 during boot

4.  Select the NVMe as the boot drive in F12 and verify correct operation.  Restart and tried again a few times, just to be sure this NVMe didn't have any potential physical or driver problems.

4.5.  (I didn't do, but should have) Physically disconnect shipped SATA and check that the computer can boot up with only NVMe physically connected.

5.  (optional) Format old SATA using command screen diskpart utility in order destroy all partitions.  Reformat into a storage drive.  (check youtube for videos on how to use it and be 100% sure you are booted on the NVMe).

6.  For me, upon restart, received BSOD saying a necessary drive is not present.

7.  Ran out and purchased a 32 GB USB.

8.  Downloaded Windows 10 USB Install Media using my other laptop.

9.  Physically disconnected formatted, shipped SATA.

10.  Booted to USB and had to fully reinstall Windows 10, losing all files and pre-installed Dell applications upon re-install.

11.  After reinstalling windows and running Windows Update, it seemed to finally run fine and restart correctly.  Importantly, the OS recovery tools that are sitting on the other partitions on the drive are untouched, so they can be referenced if this thing blows up again in a later upgrade.

12.  I re-installed formatted SSD and now it happily functions as a spot to store photos and videos and doesn't interfere with the boot sequences anymore since I completely nuked and paved it.     

Probably needed to run BootRec and FixMBR.    Especially if you are using  UEFI .   I also believe there is a drive signature that need to be updated.