M2 compatibility

I have a Gigabyte Sabre 17 GV8 laptop and want to upgrade the 128GB to a 500GB SSD.

I bought one of these to upgrade to but when i installed it after cloning all i get is the windows recovery screen. If i put the old SSD back in it boots normally.

Any one tell me what im doing wrong?

I suggest you read through this and see if there are any steps that stick out as possible things to do.

It's most likely the mbr or file format, or perhaps even some resource sharing with the M.2 slot with another device on the system.

For what it's worth, that SSD is SATA speed; not NVME, but that's probably right for the laptop anyway. There's no advantage to using M.2 at SATA speeds over standard SATA SSDs.

How did you clone your drive? Are you sure that you cloned the whole disk, and all partitions on it, rather than just the C: partition?

I also have a Gigabyte Sabre 17 and did exactly what you are trying to achieve.

Only difference was I upgraded the to Samsung 970 EVO and used Samsung's own clone "Data Migration" software, All went very well with no hiccups at all.

The performance boost is simply amazing with boot up time in around 5 seconds.

Used the acronis software to do the clone. Have used it many times at work and never had an issue.

It does sound like its not copied a partition over or correctly and this is stopping windows from booting.

Id have a look at the partitions on each drive, name, size, format etc and make sure they match.

Edited by Seansmit17 (Wed 25-Mar-20 16:19:09)

did you clone from a m2 sata to m2 nvme?
while usually it doesn't matter too much copying from a smaller size to a larger one has given me some issues in the past.

I think your question there should be "Is the drive you copied from the same size as the new one"

SATA vs nVME is not a capacity thing, Its an interface type. Just to clear it up so there is no confusion!

There is a problem with NVME (PCIe) drives (possibly only for MBR), that it may not be bootable or recognised by Windows. Plenty on the web, including problems discussed on Dell forums.

I cloned to an M2 MVME on one computer with complete success. On a second near identical computer, a similar drive failed to be bootable or recognised by Win10 install/recovery. But running Windows on the original Sata installation, the NVME drive did show in Disk Management.

The solution was a fresh clean install of Windows first, then clone on top. However, recent versions failed same way (drive not recognised so would not install), but I unearthed an early version of Win10 on a DVD, which installed OK.