Cloning 500 GB SATA SSD to 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD fails, M.2 not bootable
My initial attempts to clone the PNY 500GB SATA SSD to an ADATA XPG SXB8200 1TB NVMe resulted in a unbootable drive. My motherboard is an AS ROCK A320M/ac with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 cpu and 16 GB RAM. I started by creating the ATI 2021 Rescue Media and doing a full disc backup of the SATA SSD to an external USB drive.
I then used the rescue media to boot up and start the first cloning attempt. This was done with both drives installed on the motherboard. The result was that the NVMe ssd was unbootable. After belatedly researching the Forum, I learned this was not the way to do a cloning operation
I then discovered Steve Smith's "topic:Steve migrate NVMe SSD". Removed the SATA SSD from the motherboard and set it aside. Left the NVMe drive on the motherboard. I followed his procedure exactly using the Restore function to do a Full Disc Backup to the NVMe drive. The result was the M.2 NVMe was bootable and all my programs and data were present on the new drive. Following his instructions I also used MiniTool Partition Wizard extend my C: partition to the end of the disc. Mission accomplished.
Many thanks to Steve Smith, "Enchantech", and "Mustang". You guys are truly great and present great solutions to us neophytes. Thank you.


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Kevin,
Always good to hear success stories. Thanks for the acknowledgment of the MVP contributions.
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Kevin, here's an explanation so you can better understand what happened. I think you tried the initial clone with the rescue media before you booted Windows with the NVMe drive installed in the computer. NVMe drives have the disk controller installed on the drive. The NVMe controller is not part of the motherboard. Therefore, Windows didn't have the NVMe driver installed when you did the clone. That's why it didn't boot. If you had installed the NVMe drive and booted Windows before you did the clone, Windows would have discovered the NVMe controller and installed the driver for it. Then the clone would have worked the first time. The reason your backup and restore worked was because Windows had already installed the NVMe driver before you did the backup. Therefore, it was able to boot.
There are a number of option you could have followed:
1. Install the new NVMe drive and boot Windows from the original SSD. Then a live from Windows or a clone from the rescue media should work. You could also do a backup and recovery at this point (which is what you did).
2. Backup and restore or clone the SSD to the NVMe drive before the original Windows was allowed to boot with the NVMe drive installed. Then neither would result in a bootable system. That could be corrected by injecting the NVMe driver into the restored or cloned system on the NVMe drive. This can be done using Universal Restore from the rescue media. It can also be done by using the command line tool dism /Add-Driver from the WinPE rescue media. Either way you need to have the NVMe driver available and know how to point to it in the correct format for the process to work.
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Paul, this is a very good point and one that can be completely overlooked. I'm glad I read this.
Thanks!
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Paul, yes, you nailed it. Thank you for the additional explanation. It all makes sense to me now. However, when I was in the middle of it and nothing was working, I really thought I had bit off more than I could chew.
Thanks to you MVP experts, I now have a much better appreciation for all the important details that must be met for a successful outcome.
As a longtime Acronis user (10 years I think), this one episode reminds me why Acronis is my product of choice and the Acronis Forum is an invaluable resource when I get in trouble.
Again my sincere thanks to you guys.
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