Solved Cloning M.2 drive to Another M.2 drive Using Macrium?

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Brandon Byrnes

Brandon Byrnes

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Jan 3, 2017
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I am planning on moving my OS to a larger capacity m.2 nvme drive. It is currently on a m.2 nvme drive. I have a m.2 drive external enclosure which I plan on using. I haven't used Macrium in a long time to clone a drive so I can't remember what the process was, but is it possible to clone my OS drive while I still use my PC? Also I have bitlocker enabled on my OS drive so can I leave it enabled and it will transfer to the new drive allowing use of the same decryption key, or should I disable bitlocker before cloning? I do have multiple m.2 slots on my mobo but I don't want to be juggling around m.2 drives and figure cloning my OS drive to an m.2 in an external enclosure would be the easiest. Any help you can give is appreciated, thanks.
 
Are the drives the same? When moving drives (especially OS drives) we like to recommend a fresh install of Windows + drivers. This helps eliminate the potential of residual drivers causing issues with differing hardware.
 
Pyro said:
Are the drives the same? When moving drives (especially OS drives) we like to recommend a fresh install of Windows + drivers. This helps eliminate the potential of residual drivers causing issues with differing hardware.
Click to expand...
Agree.
Depending on the maker of the drive they may have a clone software. I know Samsung does and so do most reputable suppliers.
Brandon Byrnes said:
is it possible to clone my OS drive while I still use my PC
Click to expand...
Why would you want to?
Depending on the size and the computer it should take an hour maybe.
Putting the drive directly into the computer will be the fastest way to do it.
You should not have to change drives after.
Just change the boot order in the bios.
 
Regarding a fresh install. I am just upgrading my existing system to a larger OS drive so I'm not sure why I would have to do a fresh install. Unless you mean doing it if I'm moving the OS drive to a different PC, which I'm not. I actually ended up not using Macrium becuase I found out Macrium isn't free anymore, I haven't used it in probably 2yrs so i didn't know they charge for it now.
My existing OS drive was on a Sabrent M.2 drive and i remembered that it included a free copy of Acronis True Image, so i ended up using that and since i was going from one M.2 drive to another M.2 drive I used that external enclosure and it only took a half hour and i was still able to use my PC during the cloning process. I am currently using that new M.2 drive right now and everything went fine. The only weird thing is, it seems Bitlocker encryption wasn't migrated to the new M.2 drive which isn't a problem, but, for some reason it's requiring me to enter the bitlocker key for my Bitlocker encrypted storage drive. I tried to set that storage drive to auto decrypt but it gave me an data error within the bitlocker program. So right now I'm decrypting that storage drive which is probably going to take a good 15hrs (it's a 7TB drive) and once decrypted I'll re-enable bitlocker on it. It's a pain in the butt, but I like to have my data encrypted.
 
Pyro said:
Are the drives the same? When moving drives (especially OS drives) we like to recommend a fresh install of Windows + drivers. This helps eliminate the potential of residual drivers causing issues with differing hardware.
Click to expand...
Do you mean the same manufacturer, or the same drive type. They are the same drive type, PCIE 4.0 M.2 NVME, but one is a Samsung and the other is a Sabrent. Before I saw your comment i had already went ahead and did the clone using Acronis and everything went fine, i'm currently using the cloned drive right now.
 
Different drives use different software/drivers, because of this we typically don't recommend cloning or deploying images to new drives unless they are identical to the old ones.

It sounds like you went ahead and it worked out for you, we just like to ensure no issue where we can. 🙂
 
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If both drives are connected then you could drag & drop the partitions from the old drive to the new drive or choose the ‘clone’ option.
However I see you’ve already cloned the drive.
 
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