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Here's my particular situation:

Have a new MSI Codex R desktop which came with a 500 Gb SATA SSD with Win 10 Home. I've booted up, pulled windows update, installed my G513 Carbon keyboard driver and a webcam driver from Logitech. That's it. The drive is balkanized into several partitions (I suspect some are backup/recovery partitions).

Before I do anything more, I want to install a new ADATA 8200 1TB M.2 nVME drive in the empty M.2 slot. Then I wish to load the new M.2 nVME drive with the contents of the SATA drive (so it can become the system drive with Windows 10).

I want to preserve (in a functioning state) any MSI recovery partitions, etc. originally on the SATA SSD in the new nVME SSD. I'm not in the know of how these recovery partitions work - can they be moved around on the same drive and still be found by the recovery software as long as content/volume name don't change?

I'd like to know what steps and tools would be best for this. That's my main goal of asking here.

I do not have the option of a disk duplicator (AFAIK) because the duplicators I've seen do SATA to SATA and don't support NVME. Is there a cheap, decent duplicator that would support SATA to nVME duplication? Or is that even feasible?

I'd like to adjust some partitions on the new nVME SSD from the sizes/organization on the SATA SSD (the new drive is much larger) and perhaps the order (if that makes sense) but still make sure the MSI backup/recovery stuff ought to work if I need it to. So the tool probably needs to be able to expand, merge, relocate partitions.

I've heard of Macrium Reflect, Acronis TrueImage, Clonezilla, and others. I have found trying to figure out what I ought to do (what type of a transfer/cloning, what tool) to be a bit of a mire...

After I can boot from the nVME drive, I'm happy to wipe the original 500 Gb SATA SSD to use for more storage.

The BIOS is setup in UEFI mode and Windows 10 Home is installed on the SATA SSD (the nvME M.2 SSD is not installed yet). I want the same windows install preserved so I'm assuming moving it to a new drive, reassigning drive letters to keep the system partition to be the same drive letter should make for a fairly straightforward step.

What do you recommend for tools and for steps in the process?

EDIT: Here's the process I imagine:

  1. Install nVME drive on the M.2 slot. Don't change boot order. Make sure it is formatted. (If it isn't, that brings up the question of how to format it or whether that's necessary with most products that clone?)
  2. Run a clone (sector by sector or otherwise) from the SATA SSD to nVME SSD. (Question that arises: Do I need to boot from a USB key or other device so the OS is not actually running with cloning software?)
  3. Disconnect the SATA drive for now.
  4. Set the boot settings in the BIOS to start the new nVME drive with the same drive letter as the SATA drive had.
  5. If all goes well, it starts, everything runs.

Then I can reformat the 500 Gb SATA drive.

Does that sound about right?

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  • I don't thikn the closure of this was appropriate. The linked article focused on Windows 7 and on HDD -> SSD. No mention of M.2 or nVME drives anywhere in sight in that article. That's why I posted my particular question.
    – user3055321
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 3:51

2 Answers 2

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One thing that you can do is just copy over all the data on the one ssd and put it onto the new m.2 ssd. This website article has a few different ways that you can do this.

With the AOMEI Backupper PRO, you can just clone the system info instead of the entire drive contents. But that would cost money, the Standard version allows you to copy the entire drive to a new one...

Hope this helps!

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Use Macrium Reflect. It's free and I did this like a month ago and it worked perfectly! Here is the home site for Macrium Reflect
Here is the clone info from there Knowledge base
Download the Home edition [this is a 30 day trial- so free-ish]
Follow the basic instructions. It is best to have a external harddrive.
There are many programs that are free, you may wish to try a Sister site Software Recommendations
Creating a complete backup of your hard drive by cloning it is never a bad idea. Hardware can fail, and it's a pain losing your data
Here's a good tutorial Recommended from a different site:

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  • This was closed but I don't feel like that is appropriate. My question did not involve a HDD. It involved two SSDs with notably different physical interfaces (plus any other distinctions between SATA SSD and an M2. nVME that I might not be aware of). The article the closer referenced was particularly HDD -> SSD and Windows 7. I'm in Win 10 and was looking for particulars related to SATA SSD -> M.2 nVME SSD issues.
    – user3055321
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 3:50
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    The process will be the same for an HDD and SSD and windows 7 and 10.
    – Salocor
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 3:52
  • That's one of the things I wanted to get clarified. Thanks.
    – user3055321
    Commented Feb 5, 2021 at 1:17
  • Having used Macrium Reflect, I had an oddity I am still concerned about. One of the partitions on the original drive was the vendor's recovery partition. It was at the far end of the first drive. The second drive was larger. So I moved moved the partition for the recovery partition of the vendor to the end of the second drive. I then increased the size of the data partition before the vendor's recovery partition. MY concern was that the copied recovery partition was slightly ( a few bytes?) smaller than the the original according to Disk Management. Unsure of the implications.
    – user3055321
    Commented Jan 19, 2023 at 21:33

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