Skip to main content

Cloning from a SATA HDD running Windows 7 to an NVME / M.2 drive

Thread needs solution

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

0 Users found this helpful

Anthony, welcome to these User Forums.

My first thoughts here would be to ask: have you tried doing a vanilla install of Windows 7 for the Optiplex 7050 computer with the NVMe M.2 SSD drive - if so, does the Windows installer recognise the drive as a valid target for the installation of Windows?

If you could get that vanilla Win 7 working, then you could capture what device drivers would be needed for trying to restore your SATA backup of Win 7, and perhaps install those same drivers on the SATA version of Windows so they are included in the backup being restored.

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.