Question Laptop supports 2 M.2 drives, I add a 2nd, how do I move Win10 to it?

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,407
8,040
136
Lenovo P1 Gen 1 Thinkpad, came with 256GB M.2 drive, which has gotten quite cramped. Just installed a Samsung 1TB M.2 in the 2nd slot. I want to move everything on the first drive to the second drive. The laptop is running Windows 10 Pro 64bit. Can I use Macrium Free to do this? I haven't downloaded anything yet. Or can Windows 10 handle this (saw in search that it has some cloning ability).

I haven't formatted the new 1TB M.2 drive yet but initialized it to GPT, so it's one big ~1TB unpartitioned drive.
 

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,407
8,040
136
Why not just use Samsung Data Migration?

It's one of the easiest cloning software that's out there, and I've pretty much used it since 2015 to cloning data to a new Samsung drive.
Thanks... this is my intro to SDM, had never heard of it. I assume it's a free download, I'll go look for it...
 

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,407
8,040
136
Both M.2 drives are Samsung drives. But after cloning the 256GB drive to the 1TB drive, I plan to remove the 256GB drive and replace it with an Adata 500GB M.2 drive that is suspect to say the least. It was in my desktop and apparently failed. Windows 10 Pro wouldn't boot and I couldn't reinstall to it, the Windows 10 install USB flash didn't see it. So, I bought a replacement Crucial 500GB M.2 for the desktop. On a lark yesterday I put the evidently failed Adata M.2 drive in this laptop before putting the new Samsung 1TB in, to see if it was seen. Well, it was seen, but Windows seemed to grind to a halt when I tried to access it. Disk Management even wasn't working. But after 10-15 minutes Disk Management showed the Adata drive, indicating that the main partition was RAW, healthy and unformatted. The other partitions appeared OK. I tried to format the RAW partition and Disk Management stalled, even though I chose Quick format. But after a time it completed the format and the drive is acting normally, AFAICT. Only copied a few folders to it.

Can I test that drive with the Samsung Magician utility? The main drive will be the Samsung 1TB.
 

RLGL

Platinum Member
Jan 8, 2013
2,062
294
126
Also get the NVME driver from Samsung.

Can I test that drive with the Samsung Magician utility?

The utility only works with Samsung product. Adata may have something similar.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Muse

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,407
8,040
136
I saw info somewhere that after migrating windows 10 from one M.2 to the other M.2 on the machine that I need to go into BIOS to get the machine to boot from the new one. I suppose I can just remove the original and not have to do that. Or is there a way to do it without BIOS interaction? I do plan to remove the original drive and put in the suspect Adata 500GB M.2.
 

deustroop

Golden Member
Dec 12, 2010
1,916
354
136
You will have to access the bios.
On some machines a simple boot menu for dual boot and other configured machines is available by pressing a specified key during boot. Others, like yours, allow easy access to the whole bios . Here are recommended access paths to the bios on boot. You will then adjust the boot order as allowed in the bios.

 

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,407
8,040
136
Didn't access the BIOS. What I did was fire up the Samsung Migration Tool, also opened the PDF manual. But the interface is so simple and intuitive I didn't read the manual, I just migrated from the 256GB to the 1TB and rebooted. The reboot was weird because the machine had to do some reconfiguring, don't know what or why but it acted as though a drive had gone a bit crazy and it needed to redo the file allocation table, that kind of thing. After a bit, it went to sign on, and it booted to the 256GB drive. I shut down, opened the machine, moved the 1TB drive to where the 256GB had been, removed the 256GB and put in the Adata 500GB M.2 that I seem to have redeemed (OP). Fired it up and as anticipated (hoped) it booted fine to the 1TB and the machine is acting fine AFAIK. I installed the Samsung Magician tool, also the Adata SSD Toolbox and opened them, looked, poked around, ran the benchmarking from the Samsung magician tool (on both drives, one after the other). I'd, already installed the Samsung NVMe driver. The 1TB drive is about 3x faster than the Adata drive!!! Maybe if I install an Adata driver it will perform better, or maybe it's just a slow drive. It uses an earlier SSD protocol, PCIe Gen 3 x 2. The Samsung 1TB drive uses PCIe Gen 3 x 4.