Question Question about NVMe and changing my boot drive.

[Bat123Man]

I moved from a 5400 old-school drive which came with my laptop to a new Nvme. I deliberately bought the same size (1 TB) so that I didn't have to worry about partition sizes. I used Macrium Reflect to clone the partitions, then went into my BIOS and changed the boot drive. Worked perfectly! My question; since I had cloned the previous installation, wouldn't Win10 assume it needed to load the driver for an old-school HD? How did it know to load a different driver for an M.2 drive? Do I have to do anything after the fact in order to ensure it uses the proper driver? It seems to be working perfectly, everything loads incredibly quickly. I still have my original HD partitions, but plan on creating one single large storage partition with that drive.

 

[EXCellR8]

The laptop probably didn't need a driver to boot from the NVMe drive or it was already on the drive that you cloned; the firmware either can boot from it or it can't. Most new hardware will support booting from M.2 devices.

 

[Billy Tallis]

Usually when I clone a Win10 image from a SATA to NVMe drive, it tries and fails to boot a few times before giving me the recovery menu. Choosing to reboot into Safe Mode causes Windows to properly re-detect hardware, and as soon as it's done booting into Safe Mode you can reboot normally and carry on using the NVMe boot drive.