Dell Inspiron Gaming laptop WD blue M.2 SSD WDS250G1B0B
Somebody please help!!
I received the dell inspiron Gaming laptop today with 1 TB HDD. I opened it up and physically installed the WD blue M.2 SSD WDS250G1B0B (250 GB) in the extra port provide.My objective is to transfer windows 10 to SSD and use that as boot drive. After booting up I tried to install the WD version of Acronis Ture Image. It installed fine but when I am trying to start it give message that WD drive needs to be installed.
Am I doing something wrong here. Can someone guide me.
I do not know anything about your laptop but I did look up your M.2 drive specs. First M.2 is simply a formfactor meaning it is designed to fit into an M.2 connection. This particular drive is an SATA based drive. Most M.2 connections on todays laptops are not SATA connections but rather PCIe connections. Like I say I know nothing about your laptop but if this is true with yours, which I think it is, you will not be able to use thes WD M.2 drive as you intend.
To make this work you would need an NVMe M.2 PCIe x4 Gen 3 drive like a Samsung 950 Pro for example.
Thanks for your response. I have downloaded the latest version of WD ATI still that does not detect the M.2 SSD.
can you elaborate or guide me on this - "Also, it is best to clone using recovery media rather than from within windows - significant risk of things going wrong doing it from within windows. "
Hi Enchanted,
this is my laptop - http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/inspiron-15-7567-laptop/pd.
Can you check once more and confirm if I can migrate the OS to SSD (the WD blue one) and make the SSD primary.
What is the actual version / build of your WD version of Acronis True Image? From reading this topic it seems that you have an older version that does not have any support for the M.2 SSD drive in your laptop, hence it cannot see it, so you cannot clone or use backup & restore to move your Windows 10 OS to the new SSD.
If you are not sure about the version / build, then post a zip file with the Acronis log files that are found in C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs folder and this will help us to determine this information.
I very much suspect that you will need to use a later version of ATIH such as 2016 or 2017 to get the necessary support for this M.2 drive - this was only added to the later builds of 2016 some months ago, and even then you may need to create the Windows PE version of the Acronis bootable Rescue Media to be able to safely perform this type of migration.
What is the actual version / build of your WD version of Acronis True Image? From reading this topic it seems that you have an older version that does not have any support for the M.2 SSD drive in your laptop, hence it cannot see it, so you cannot clone or use backup & restore to move your Windows 10 OS to the new SSD.
If you are not sure about the version / build, then post a zip file with the Acronis log files that are found in C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs folder and this will help us to determine this information.
I very much suspect that you will need to use a later version of ATIH such as 2016 or 2017 to get the necessary support for this M.2 drive - this was only added to the later builds of 2016 some months ago, and even then you may need to create the Windows PE version of the Acronis bootable Rescue Media to be able to safely perform this type of migration.
Mine shows -
Acronis True Image WD Edition Software
File Size: 405 MB
Version: 2016 WD Edition, Build 33
Release Date: 12/16/2016
link -
Thankyou for the ATIH WD version information which says in the release notes that it has support for NVMe drives but doesn't mention anything about M.2 drive support.
Have you installed this ATIH version in Windows, and does it detect / recognise your M.2 drive when you try to select this as either your Source or Destination when configuring a backup task?
If this can be selected in the Windows version of ATIH but not when using Acronis Rescue Media, then this would suggest that additional device drivers are needed which are not included in the Rescue Media by default.
Please see KB document; 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products for how support is provided for your ATIH WD Software.
I believe Steve is right in that you need to use TI 2016 version 6581 or later to work with this drive.
Beyond that however as I said before your M.2 SSD is an SATA AHCI drive. What I think you will find is that this being an SATA device it will not be selectable for a image restore or clone as a boot device. These SATA AHCI based drives even though they are in an M.2 formfactor will not boot an OS in most cases. The NVMe based M.2 formfactor drives can boot an OS so those devices have been designed to do what you are attempting.
Having said that it is possible to install Windows onto one of these SATA based M.2 drives in some cases and make it work. You might pull that off here as the connector in your machine will accept both PCIe NVMe based drives and SATA AHCI based drives although the later I suspect will only be capable of being used as a storage drive and not bootable but you can try if you like.
As for cloning I would not do that here at all! Not recommended at this time. There have been a large number of users having failed clone attempts to date so I would advise against that period. The options would be to attempt to perform a backup image restore to the device but as I said the drive may not be selectable as a destination because I believe it will show, if using the right version of TI, as greyed out ie. non supported device.
I am providing link to the user manual for your machine and if you look at page 15 there you will see the specification for the M.2 slot in the machine.
http://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_laptop/esuprt_ins…
I just saw your post with the Acronis TI version details and think it confirms my suspicion that only and NVMe based drive will be supported for image restore or clone operation.
Let's get back to basics first - the manual states it supports both NVME and SATA drives....
Storage Table 9. Storage specifications
Interface • SATA 6 Gbps • PCIe/NVMe
Hard drive One 2.5-inch drive (SATA)
Solid-state drive One M.2 drive (SATA or PCIe/NVMe)
so......
1) Does the bios show the old 1TB hard drive and the new 250GB m.2 SSD as both being attached? If it doesn't show up in the bios, it's not going to show up anywhere else. You may need to make sure you have it seated correctly if it's not showing up in the bios information.
2) If it does show up in the bios, when booted to your original OS drive, does it show up in disk management? If so, does it need to be initialized? If so, do that, format it as GPT and assign it a drive letter. Can you then see the drive letter from Windows Explorer?
Once you've gotten that far with it, you know the drive is compatible for your system and that's part 1. If you don't get that far, there's not much we can do to help yet.
3) Assuming it (the current OS on the old drive) does see the new M.2 250GB SSD drive, but it is not recognized with the Acronis rescue media (as mentioned above - use your rescue media to clone to this drive... it would be better if you could take a full disk image of the original drive as a backup - just in case though - you've been warned) you will want to try building WinPE rescue media. The Linux rescue media probably doesnt' see it because it is in RAID for the SATA mode (but I can only guess - what is your SATA mode in the bios?). Either that, or it may not see it due to the specific controller used on the Dell since it seems to be able to detect both m.2 SATA and/or m.2. NVME/PCIE.
If that is the case, from the Acronis application (even the OEM one), you can build your own rescue media. Don't use the default option (Linux), but instead, use the WinPE option. It will prompt you to download and install Windows ADK first. Do that first. Then build your WinPE rescue media and try to use that instead.
Now does it see the new drive with the rescue media? Let's check that first. You may still have issues at this point (lack of drivers), but let's start here and see what happens. I would normally recommend our WinPE MVP tool (linked below) to help you build the media since it makes driver injection easier, but I suspect your free OEM version is not compatible with it. You can try it and see if it runs or not though and let us know.
Please also take a look at the screenshots in this Dell post - it helps explain what you should be looking for with your rescue media when booting it on a Dell. I suspect you want to be booting it in UEFI mode though as this is a newer machine. It won't be exactly the same since they are different Dell models, but should be very close.
Thanks everyone for the help and support. I have overcame the issue (unknowingly) and finally was able to clone to 256gb sata SSD and it was pretty smooth.
The reason why ATI was not able to identify the drive because it was not initialized. I was so frustated and then I installed a free tool AOMEI OneKey Recovery and then started cloning. However I cancelled it soon as I realized I have not taken backup. When I clicked ATI now, it started fine and then I was able to create recovery backup and then just cloned using automatic setting. It started without any hiccup. My system was restarted and after the cloning ended one more restart later, my system was back up with SSD now automitically set as primary drive. All I had to do was to format my 1TB HDD.
To those who said M.2 Sata wont work, I can confirm its working. Here is the screenshot of my drives.
Yup - drive must be initialized - see my note #2 above.
Yup - your system supports m.2 SATA and M.2 PCI-NVME - see my note above.
There is no reason any machine that has SATA (just about any pc) cannot use an M.2 SATA drive (it's PCIE NVME that can be more problematic). SATA is SATA. M.2 (as Enchantech mentioned above) is just a form factor, nothing more.
Main thing is you got it sorted out and are in business again. It's hard to troubleshoot remotely blind - hence the "what if" or "you could" try scenarios. Process of elimination until it's narrowed down.
Glad you got it working. The SATA based drives must have a proper OpRom on board to support booting and the bios firmware must also support the same. There are drives on the market that will only work as storage drives due to these factors. Obviously yours was capable, other users contemplating such as this should be certain that what they are buying is compatible to avoid such incompatibility.
Enjoy the new hardware!