Crucial SSD Replacement

I wanted to update my internal hard drive to have more space so I could game more and have all my music on one place. How hard could it be? Pretty hard apparently.

For one thing, I made the stupid mistake of buying the wrong form factor the first time. I watched a video taking apart my computer and saw they used the SSD, so I figured that must be it. I had opened my computer before and seen the little cage that I figured must be holding the SSD - why else would it be so big?

Imagine my shock opening my computer to find out that it’s NVME m.2. Yikes!

So my boyfriend and I decided to use the SSD to build a gaming computer.

We went with Crucial for the NVME. My computer did not have a second NVME slot to have two in at a time, so I had to buy an enclosure. Whatever.

I formatted and initialized the Crucial disk. Then I went to the Acronis True Image cloning software. It said it could not find the disk. How was this possible?!

Many forum threads later, I found that apparently, you are supposed to have the Crucial inside the laptop and the old SSD in the enclosure. I was confused but prepared to move ahead until I saw people saying you must make a backup. I became anxious about losing all my data. I couldn’t use the SSD to make a backup for reasons, so I had to buy another Crucial SSD…….

For reasons I don’t remember, I make a bootable media backup of my computer using Veeam. It was a Bare Metal Recovery. The idea was if something went wrong, then I could use this to recover my computer.

Several months passed before I got the nerve to try again. I swapped out my old SSD for the new one. I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order and disabled secure boot. I was shocked to find that my computer could not boot from the old SSD in the enclosure. What the heck? It booted fine from inside but in the enclosure, suddenly it didn’t work? I wasn’t going to be able to clone it at this rate!

So we tried booting from the backup. Surprisingly, that worked. I used the bootable media to boot into Windows in the newest SSD. I didn’t need to use Acronis True Image at all weirdly enough.

What was left was to change the partition. My C: drive still had the limit of 270 GB. But there was a recovery partition in between the C: and the unallocated terabyte, so I couldn’t just extend it. I followed a guide on how to move the recovery partition to the end (by deleting it and recreating it) so I didn’t have to download any more sketchy software. Finally, I had my terabytes of data.

I guess it unexpectedly worked out? The only problem is my backup was several months old, so it was missing some files. Not a huge deal, mostly some gaming related ones. I had not used my computer for months since it was basically full.

I write this out in case I ever need to do this again. Use Veeam bootable media, it is a lifesaver and it is free!