Cloning from a SATA HDD running Windows 7 to an NVME / M.2 drive
Cloning from a SATA HDD running Windows 7 to an NVME / M.2 drive
I have a bunch of Dell Optiplex 7050 workstations all running SATA HDD / Windows 7 Pro.
I acquired an Optiplex 7050 but instead of a SATA HDD it came with an NVME / M.2 drive with Windows 10.
Is there a way to restore from a cloned Windows 7 Pro on a SATA HDD to the NVME / M.2 drive?
I believe Windows 7 doesn't natively support NVME / M.2 drives and it requires an update and some prepping.
I tried Clonezilla and was able to clone from HDD to M.2 but it doesn't get past the Windows 7 splash screen which leads me to believe it is in fact a driver issue.
Anyone have the steps to do this?
Thank you!
Anthony


- Log in to post comments

Anthony,
If you apply the HotFix available from Microsoft for the NVMe support to an installed Win 7 installation you can then Clone that Win 7 install to an NVMe drive for use as a boot device.
Follow the instructions in this MS article to Update the Win 7 install Add NVMe support to Win 7
If you have a number of these to do I would suggest that you update each install independently and clone each independently to avoid any activation issues.
Adding the support to an existing install will carry over that support to a cloned drive. Same would be true for an update, create backup image, restore that image use case scenario.
- Log in to post comments