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5 Practitioner

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274.2K Posts

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April 17th, 2019 07:00

7490 clone to NVMe

I have a user that we just gave a Latitude 7490 to and I want to clone the original 128GB drive to a larger 500GB or 1TB NVMe drive but I’m not sure if that would work? Can anyone confirm that? Do I insert the NVMe in the m.2 slot after cloning and that’s it?

9 Legend

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14K Posts

April 17th, 2019 07:00

It depends on a few things.  First, check the system's SATA Operation setting, which despite the name affects NVMe devices.  If it's set to RAID, then yes it will be that easy -- except you MIGHT need to provide the Intel Rapid Storage driver to whatever bootable environment you use for cloning the system if the Windows PE environment you're using doesn't have a sufficiently new Intel RST driver built in.  If you're set to AHCI, then if the existing 128GB drive is also NVMe, it will be that easy and you won't even need a driver.  If you're set to AHCI and the existing 128GB drive is SATA, then it won't be that easy because the Windows environment will be set up to expect to boot from a SATA drive and therefore will NOT be configured to load the NVMe class driver at startup -- which means it won't be able to boot from an NVMe device.  RAID mode sidesteps this issue because in that case, Windows is set up to load a RAID driver in either case and the Intel RST controller abstracts the interface back to the actual storage, so Windows doesn't have to worry about that.

Unfortunately you can't really change that SATA Operation setting for an existing OS installation, because switching between RAID and AHCI causes this same boot problem on existing Windows installations.  It's meant to be changed before you reinstall an OS.  However, if you're in AHCI mode, I've read that there are some ways to switch an existing OS to RAID (or vice versa) without a full reinstall -- they basically involve making some preparatory changes, booting into Safe Mode, and a few other things -- but I haven't looked into those in detail.  Alternatively, if you use Macrium Reflect to perform the clone operation (which I personally recommend and which is a pretty popular overall), then the paid versions have a feature called ReDeploy which is explicitly meant to deal with facilitating clones/restores onto dissimilar hardware by modifying the cloned/restored Windows installation to allow it to boot on that dissimilar hardware. So even if you're in AHCI mode and will be switching from a SATA SSD to an NVMe SSD, you could clone the installation and then run ReDeploy and you'll be good to go.  And again, even if you don't need ReDeploy, I recommend Macrium Reflect, which does also have a free version that is perfectly usable for basic cloning and imaging operations.

5 Practitioner

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274.2K Posts

April 17th, 2019 08:00

Thanks for the details. My boss already placed an order for a larger M.2 SATA drive so I won't be able to test this out tomorrow but it will be useful in the future.

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