Unsolved
1 Rookie
•
3 Posts
0
29
January 8th, 2025 15:58
Area-51m R2, cloning NVMe drive to Crucial NVMe drive
Alienware Area-51m R2
Hey guys, I have an alienware area 51m r2 laptop, amazing machine, My C drive is running on an nvme 500gb drive, I purchased new drives from cruical, so I have 4tb nvme drive and I have tried cloning the c drive with 4 different coloning softwares, I still cannot get the new drive to boot. I get a blue screen with options, none of which will allow me to boot the new drive, Of I put the old drive back in no worries it will boot. But I don't understand why it won't boot after cloning. None of the drive systems are on raid. Bitlocker is not on the laptop I habe tried booting from that drive after removing all my drives and leaving the cloned drive in I created a usb flash drive of windows 10, to try and boot into that and repair the startup the flash drive won't boot. Am I missing something ? the laptop was built by dell so both nvme drives are dell standard nvme drives.
ejn63
10 Elder
•
28.6K Posts
0
January 8th, 2025 16:12
After imaging the drive, immediately shut down and remove all but the new drive. Put that is the slot occupied by the current boot drive.
Boot the system from that drive. Once that's done, you can reinstall the original drive if you want to use it for storage.
What you must not do is boot the newly imaged drive with the original in the system.
fragglecasper
1 Rookie
•
3 Posts
0
January 8th, 2025 17:14
I have done this,
So from the start, sell built the machine, the nvme drives are dell nvme drives.
I simply bought bigger drives now on cruical website that recommended the best drives for my laptop, 4tb nvme 3 plus drive.
I cloned it serveral times, I put it in to the c drive slot taken out the old c drive, would not boot.
Blue screen, options the options are pointless.
I took out all the drives and left the new cloned drive, would not boot, blue screen again.
I created the flash drive with windows 10 to repair the start up, that wouldn't boot from boot manager,
I have tried serveral times to boot the usb flash drive on its own,
And to boot from the new clone drive,
None of these options work.
When I replace the cloned drive with the orginal nvme drive with my operating system on it. It works fine.
Cannot figure this out..
Any help is greatfully appericated
ejn63
10 Elder
•
28.6K Posts
0
January 8th, 2025 17:52
What imaging software have you tried, and have you disabled secure boot on first bootup with the new drive?
fragglecasper
1 Rookie
•
3 Posts
0
January 8th, 2025 21:41
@ejn63 I have maybe figured it out,
When dell installed windows on my machine, the operating system was installed on my 500gb nvme drive, but the efi healthy partition 500mb of it was installed on my sata drive,
That efi healthy partition is the bootloader, and it is on a separate drive, which would be the issue,
I found this out when I decided that if I cannot clone the new nvme drive successful, I'll try and clone the old nvme drive to the new sata ssd drive which I have also, but when I removed the old sata drive and installed the new sata ssd drive windows would not boot,
When I took a closer look at my drives, I saw that the old sata drive had the 500mb of healthy efi partiton which should be on the orginal nvme drive with the operating system.
So I don't know where to go from here.
When dell.built the computer they installed as I said 2 nvme drives 500gb
1 barracuda 1tb sata drive.
I want to upgrade all these drives to much bigger drives.
Would it work if I cloned the operating system nvme to the new nvme,
And of I cloned the old barracuda drive to the new ssd sata drive, and then installed both of them,
Would it boot up, then, in theory I am cloning the same setup from two drives which are working and booting correctly, to two new drives, would that work do you think.