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June 28th, 2019 08:00

If your system is currently in RAID mode, do not change it to AHCI as part of this process.  Leave it in RAID and you won't have anything to worry about, because in that situation the Intel Rapid Storage controller is active and abstracting the hardware interface from the OS.  This means that Windows just has to load the Intel RST driver for that controller regardless of whether you're using a SATA or NVMe drive, so this migration won't be an issue.  If your system is currently in AHCI mode though, then migrating from a SATA to NVMe SSD will cause a problem because in AHCI mode, the system exposes the raw hardware interface to the OS rather than placing them behind a Rapid Storage controller.  The reason that's an issue is because SATA and NVMe require different drivers to be loaded at boot in that situation, so when you clone a SATA-based Windows installation to an NVMe system, Windows won't be set up to load the correct driver.  Unfortunately if you're already in AHCI mode, then you can't just switch to RAID before performing the clone, because that too causes Windows to load the incorrect driver (it's set up for SATA, and now needs to load Intel RST).  RAID vs. AHCI is a setting that is meant to be changed before you install the OS in the first place, not after it's already installed or will be cloned.

But if you're in RAID mode, then you should be able to just clone the 128 GB SSD to the new one and be good to go.  I'm assuming you are NOT trying to "combine" the data from both of your current source disks onto this one new disk.  If you are, that's a bit more complicated.  But anyhow, Macrium Reflect Free is a popular tool for this purpose, and here is their guide for cloning a disk.  Pay particular attention to Steps 4 and 5 that discuss how to specify a partition resize as part of the clone, since you're moving from a smaller SSD to a larger one.  Depending on your partition layout, it might not be easy to extend the C drive afterward, so you'll want to do that as part of the clone job itself.  After the clone completes, remove the old drive, install the new one, and try booting your system.  If it works, great.  If not, boot your system into your Macrium Reflect Rescue Media (create and test boot that beforehand), click "Fix Boot Problems", follow that wizard, and try again.

Lastly, if you don't have a way to have both the current 128 GB SSD and the new SSD connected at the same time to perform a true clone operation, you'll instead need to perform an image backup and restore operation.  The end result is the same, but it's a two-step process and will require you to have somewhere to temporarily store the image backup file, such as an external hard drive or network location.  In that case, you'd capture an image of your source disk to a file, shut down your PC, swap the SSDs, boot to Rescue Media, and restore that image to the newly installed SSD.  Again, resize partitions as part of this operation rather than afterward.

3 Posts

June 29th, 2019 07:00

Thank you for the information! I checked the BIOS and it says that the storage is in RAID mode with Intel storage technologies. I have only one m.2 slot in the laptop so I will have to clone or image the system drive. I plan on using my SATA HDD for this. I'll look into the app you mentioned as well. Thanks again! 

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