Windows 10: SSD to SSD upgrade advise please

HI All,
I'm hopefully receiving a new 500Gb SSD in the post today.
At the moment I have a 250Gb SSD with my operating system on, and two internal 1Tb SATA backup drives.
I use Acronis to image backup my system every month, rotating the location of the backup to my two internal drives.
One month I'll backup to my "G" drive, and the next to my "F" drive.
I've got the latest 2016 Acronis.
I want to clone my 250Gb SSD to my new 500Gb SSD.
I could use the Acronis clone tool, which would mean I would have to connect both SSD's inside my pc then disconnect the smaller one after, but I'd rather disconnect my smaller SSD, insert my new drive, then boot from an Acronis boot disk and restore one of the images from my "F" or "G" drives to the new SSD.
Would I have to prepare the new SSD drive before installing it? So that it can boot?
Would I have to format it first?
I have an SSD enclosure to USB, could I use that to format it?
Thanks!

:)

 

Windows activation key

I upgraded the SSD to a larger capacity. I cloned the smaller SSD on to the larger SSD. It boots.

Now the PC is telling me that I need to activate Windows. I called Microsoft and they put me into an automated activation key process. It was not successful.

Can someone advise me on how to recover the activation key from the smaller SSD? It came, Windows 10 enabled, with the machine.

 

Replacing Hard drive - Windows 10 (upgraded) Product Key

A bunch of questions! I've got a Vaio Flip and would like to upgrade my SSD. The SSD on my laptop is mSATA and I don't have the adapter to clone my current installed windows to the new mSATA SSD. Then I have to clone the Windows to a usb and then install
it on the new SSD. However, it seems that I need a boot disk (usb) to turn my laptop on. My Windows is beeing upgraded from 8.1 to 10 and I can't find the product key. Then I can download windows and make a boot usb. Does anybody know what I can do? Any suggestion?
I'm not professional in IT, then if you're advising, please make it as simple and straight as possible

 

• Put the new SSD in the enclosure and clone your current SSD to it.
• Open Disk management, right click on the new SSD->Extend Volume so you'll get full 500GB.
• Replace the SSD with the new one and boot up.

 

Would that work? This is what my Acronis manual says:

 

The first is a standard thing to check.
The second I didn't know.

I would

• Create a system backup of the SSD
• Restore the backup to the 500GB SSD
• Disconnect every storage device
• Boot from the new SSD.

This worked for me when I had replaced my HDD with a SSD

But I understand that replacing hardware in windows 10 would give problems regarding the activation of windows because windows registers your hardware.

 

I thought that replacing a hard drive was OK regarding activation, replacing the motherboard would be different. I might be wrong?

 

Source: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...ate-windows-10

 

You use the USB enclosure to clone the disk then replace it with the old one inside your PC case. After cloning, you cannot boot from the USB which is true. Windows 10 does not allow to boot from USB except if you have the Enterprise edition and build Windows to go then you can boot from USB.

The only thing that will require re-activation is your Mother Board. Replacing any other devices such as SSD/HD, DVD, Memory, Video Card etc... will not affect activation so you are OK.

 

Well I managed to do it!
I put my new 500Gb SSD into a USB external enclosure and formatted it. Had a slight problem recognizing the disk at first, went into disk management and sorted it out.
I then took my old SSD out of my pc, put the new one in, booted up from my Acronis recovery disk, browsed for my image on the SATA internal "G" drive, and it recovered my system to the new SSD in under 10 minutes.
Booted up fine, checked for the Windows activation, and it was activated!!! *Biggrin