Help upgrading/cloning Inspiron 5577 SSD

Which program did you use to clone the drive? Did you check the BIOS, F2 at boot, to make sure that Windows Boot Manager was still first in the boot menu? The links below use Macrium Reflect Free for this operation and it is a very easy to use program.

This YouTube video may help with cloning. Also this video at YouTube describes the procedure using image and restore as an alternative method.

I upgraded the M.2 SSD in my 5577.  Clones can be iffy and for that reason I only do disc image/restore as @filbert suggests.

I used Macrium Reflect, made a disc image, ALL PARTITIONS, to a USB connected drive.  Created a Macrium PE bootable rescue flash drive.  Removed the original M.2 SSD and installed the new M.2 SSD.  Booted with the Macrium rescue drive, restored the created disc image from the USB connected drive to the new SSD.  Used Minitool partition wizard to resize the "C" partition after booting with the new M.2 SSD.

I'm not a fan of cloning, as it can lead to two unbootable drives. Creating a full disk backup from the old drive to the new drive is safer. Once you've done that, you would remove the old drive from the laptop, install the new drive and restore the backup to the new drive.

But, I would recommend a different approach entirely. Your computer is five or six years old, so I think a clean install would be beneficial. That's what I would do and what I have done on many laptops.

Make a full disk backup of the current drive to an external drive. Remove the old drive and install the new drive. While you're in there, it would be a good idea to clean the fan and heat fins, replace the thermal paste and the CMOS battery. That may be more work than you wanted, so I'd understand if you want to stop at installing the new SSD.

1. Using Microsoft's Media Creation Tool, create a Windows installer flash drive. (If you have only one PC, perform this step before you remove the old SSD.)
2. Disconnect all peripherals: printers; USB devices; media cards; USB hubs and extenders; etc.
3. Boot from the flash drive and install windows from scratch.
4. After setting up Windows, you'll have to install your applications, so be sure to save any licence keys before removing the old drive.

Of course, now the 128GB SSD is seemingly messed up. I originally used the newest Macrium Reflect 8 with a 30 day trial period (as that was what was available on their site). I had cloned the drive before with no issues in the cloning process, but now as soon as it gets to the OS partition of the C: drive, Macrium fails.

I also can’t use the Windows Media Creation tool, because I need 8gb of free space on my C: drive, which has at best ~1gb after deleting a ton of stuff.

Any advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated. Also, thank you for the advice you’ve all already given!

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@trexelist wrote:

I had cloned the drive before with no issues in the cloning process, but now as soon as it gets to the OS partition of the C: drive, Macrium fails.

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1. As I said, cloning is not the best nor safest approach. If you must avoid a clean install, take my earlier advice to create a full disk image and restore it to the new drive. Don't clone. But, better would be to perform a clean install of Windows.

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@trexelist wrote:

I also can’t use the Windows Media Creation tool, because I need 8gb of free space on my C: drive, which has at best ~1gb after deleting a ton of stuff.

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2. Free up more space:

• Uninstall unneeded applications.
• Delete large files such as videos. 
• Use Disk Cleanup, click "Clean up system files" option, select all checkboxes, and click "More Options" tab click to clean up System Restore points.
• Check C: for any windows.old folders from when you upgraded. You can delete those.

3. You can run Media Creation Tool on another PC to create the Windows installer flash drive there, then use it on yours.

Forgot to add regarding the full shutdown, this also apply when you want to remove the disk and copy data onto the boot disk  and into the user accounts.. If you don't shutdown as my dos command then your data will not be visible after you boot up again in the user folders.

You need to keep in mind before you want to clone your drive successful you need to shutdown the computer properly otherwise the volume is in a active state " semi hibernate " and cloning will struggle.

Step one is to go into your command prompt and type: shutdown /f /s

If you are cloning from an HDD then you need to run disk defrag on all partitions because cloning tools struggle to keep track of a fragmented disk when cloning data areas only.

If you do this cloning will be 100% bootable and I use Acronis for this.