Clone SSD to bootable NVMe M.2 disk

So why install a NVMe M.2 disk?

Short answer: to increase i/o performance

As long as your motherboard has a slot for M.2 (PCI-e x4) is uses 4 lanes and can handle the NVME communications standard. Google the slot differences if you are uncertain, there is a SATA M.2 SSD, and the much faster NvMe M.2 SSD

There are as allways multiple ways to go about regarding the installation.

I wanted a disk like this to be the OS disk and made a successful conversion doing the following:

Downloaded the “Samsung Data Migration” tool which does a good job for cloning to samsung disks.

I then downloaded and installed the Samsung NVME driver for Windows 10.

I cloned my existing bootable SSD (c: drive + boot partition and recovery partition) to the new disk, V-NAND SSD 970 PRO MVMe M.2

I then had a bootable MBR disk, but I wanted a full UEFI system, so a convertion to GPT was needed to be able configure BIOS to UEFI and Windows OS boot

This can be achieved by running cmd as admin and using the buildt in tool mbr2gpt.exe from the running OS.

mbr2gpt /validate /disk:5

I got the following error: Disklayout validation failed

Examining the logs setuperr.log and setupact.log it was easy to see what it was complaining about:

2019-09-04 17:26:11, Error ValidateLayout: Last partition too close to the end of the disk. Should end at offset 512110173696 or below, found at 512110190592

2019-09-04 17:26:11, Error Disk layout validation failed for disk 5

So I used diskmanager to shrink the last (rightmost) partition so parts of the disk was unassigned.

Ran the mbr2gpt.exe tool again, validating and then the actual conversion to GPT:

mbr2gpt /convert /disk:5 /allowfullos

Converting to GPT partition table was successful, and it created a 100MB EFI systempartition.

I then went to BIOS setup, disabled CMS mode(enabled UEFI only) and set the “Windows OS boot” and NVMe M.2 disk as primary.

Up and running without reinstall, some IO speed checks with CrystalDiskMark and Samsung Magician show sequential Read 3600 MB/s and Write 2320 MB/s

A tip is to use the “AOMEI Partition assistant”if you need to merge or make corretions to the partition aligments after the clone.

Compared to the once-so speedy SSD disk, I was only getting about 550MB/s
A pretty huge IO performance boost I must say 🙂

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