Salta al contenuto principale

Clone M.2 to SATA HD and back to M.2

Thread solved

I have a Gigabyte Laptop with a Samsung M.2 drive.  For the life of me, I can not update windows 10 to build 1903 or beyond.  It fails on the 2nd boot every time and then uninstalls the update.  I've tried to do a factory restore of the computer and update everything before adding anything else to the computer and it's still a no go.  So my question is this.  I only have 1 M.2 port on the laptop plus a SATA port for a 2.5 drive.  Can I use True Image 2021 to clone my current M.2 onto the larger SATA drive so I can update windows and then clone it back to the an M.2?  I've tried restoring the computer to a SATA drive and it updates just fine.  I don't want to lose all my data and start over with everything so I want to clone, update, clone back.  I can only find info on cloning from a SATA SSD to an M.2 but not the reverse.  I don't want to buy the software unless this function is supported.  Thanks for your help.

0 Users found this helpful

JBrown, welcome to these public User Forums.

I would recommend using Backup & Recovery instead of using Cloning if you do decide to invest in buying ATI 2021 as this is safer and less complicated.

With regard to your current upgrade issue, then the approach that I would be considering taking is:

  1. Download a copy of the latest Windows 10 installation media / create install media.
    Note: This approach is assuming that your laptop has already been activated for Windows 10 either by hardware signature or using a Microsoft account.
     
  2. Remove the working Samsung M.2 SSD and install a new SATA SSD.
     
  3. Do a clean install of Windows 10 to the SATA SSD to prove that you can get the OS working with the latest 20H2 update version.

    If all goes well, then you have the option of reinstalling the Samsung M.2 SSD, making a backup of the working SATA SSD drive and then recovering that to the M.2 SSD.
    Note: you should ensure that the laptop is booting using UEFI / GPT mode as required by most NVMe M.2 SSD drives being used as OS boot drives.  This includes installing the OS to the SATA SSD using UEFI mode too.

Using Backup & Recovery does not require any adapter for the M.2 or SATA SSD drives, you just need an external backup drive to store the backup on.

Thanks for your help Steve.  I was able to clone my M.2 to a SATA HDD, upgrade my windows, and then clone back to my M.2.  There is apparently an issue with Windows/Gigabyte/M.2 NVMe drives (not samsung specific).  It was a long drawn out process for at least it did what I needed it to do.  Thanks for your help.