Windows 10: Moving current win 10 sata ssd boot drive to a NVME M.2 ssd in a new self built computer

My plan is to clone the boot drive since I plan to keep the old computer just as it is and purchase a new win 10 license for the new computer. But I don't want to reload and rearrange everything.

Hence my plan to clone my current boot drive.

Since I have no NVME M.2 connection in my current computer and the NVME M.2 to USB enclosures all get beat up online I intend to start up the new computer with the cloned drive. Then clone that drive to the new blank NVME M.2 drive which will then become the permanent boot drive for the new machine. At some, as yet undetermined, optimum point I will then apply the new Win 10 license to the new machine.


Will this work?


Is there a better way?


I do not want to do a fresh install on the new machine but since my wife is getting the old one and she doesn't care about anything on my current machine, a fresh install on my current machine after I confirm the successful transition would be acceptable if it makes things easier.


FYI My current license for Win 10 Pro was a free upgrade from Win 7 Pro. The activation message says, "Windows is activated with a digital license linked to your Microsoft account."

:)

 

Migrating Windows 10 from m.2 sata to new pcie nvme ssd

Hello all,

I'm going to upgrade my current m.2 sata 128gb to a m.2 pcie nvme 480gb and have questions about migrating Windows over. From my understanding since i have a laptop and cant connect both drives at the same time and pcie nvme isnt supported externally I was
going to try and create a restore disk of my current drive and then image it to my new drive. Will this work?

Again my process will be, create rescue disk and image to usb, power down and swap drives, enable usb boot to my usb and power on, run the rescue disk and image to my new pcie nvme ssd.

Does anyone see problems with this? Do I need a large usb or will 32gb work for a 128gb ssd?

 

Clone present nvme pcie ssd to replacement nvme pcie ssd?

I have a 500GB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe SSD (boot drive) that I want to replace with a higher capacity M.2 card.

Where do I put the new SSD during the NVMe to NVMe cloning process? My mobo only has one M.2 slot for NVMe SSD's so do I want to use an external adapter for one of the M.2 cards? If so, do you have a recommendation?

If you have solved this issue for your desktop or laptop I would like your advice on if and what extra hardware you needed during the cloning.

please remember that I am dealing with PCIe NVMe drives ONLY. NO Sata is involved except possibly for a connecting cable from the desktop to an adapter. I am experienced with cloning SATA III drives but cloning NVMe is a little
new to me.

Computer: Dell XPS 8920, 32GB ram.

Present SSD: KXG50ZNV512G NVMe Toshiba 512GB

New SSD: CT13049074 Crucial P1 NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD 1TB (or 2TB if available soon) or similar storage device.

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, version 1809.

 

Upgrading to new NVMe M.2 SSD, dropping dual boot option

Currently I have Windows 10 (up to date) and Windows 7 (up to date) both x64 Pro on a booting SSD.

When I boot the PC, it shows me which one I would like to boot with. Once installed that way using Windows 10,

so the boot option is a Windows 10 style menu, not the old-school Windows 7 dual boot screen.

Now, after working most of my time in Win 10, and having been able to upgrade all drivers and software

that didn't work in Windows 10 yet, that did work in Windows 7, I would finally like to drop Windows 7 entirely.

And since I'm upgrading to a faster nvme m.2 ssd, I would like to do the two steps in one go, if at all possible.

(But I would still like to have good recovery options. I've often been able to use the Win 7 boot option to fix

stuff for the Win 10 partition etc.)

What's the best way to go about this?

I'm experienced using Macrium Reflect to clone disks and boot drives,

but I'm not sure which partitions I should then copy, or if I need to re-install Win 10 on the new drive alone

and use some sort of Microsoft account profile to start anew with the new M.2 ssd taking as much as I can

through the MS account into the new install.

What would you recommend me doing? If I do need to perform a fresh install, does the license still work, and if so, how to handle that?

Is it for example possible to install windows 10 cleanly on that new ssd,

and then use macrium reflect to overwrite only the Win10 partition from the older ssd,

so everything is still there and I don't need to re-install all 3rd party software/drivers etc. ?

TIA