Clone a drive with windows install

I want to upgrade an nvme drive that has my windows install on it. Is there a sane way to clone the entire drive to a new, larger, drive. After the clone, will I be able to boot from the new drive without having to jump through a bunch of hoops? I know there is info about this elsewhere on the web, but looking for some advice from the trusted level one techs community.

With Windows, you’ll always have “some hoofs”. Doing a pixel perfect, byte-to-byte clone is easy, and there are many tools that will do that. What is not is that Windows boot manager links to your current drive, i.e. it’s identifiers are used during the boot process and after clone the bootloader will get confused, as it still thinks it resides on the previous drive. But this isn’t difficult to fix either with the help of windows recovery. Just search for fixing the BCD

Here’s my process:

  1. Decrypt the drive if you use BitLocker
  2. Perform an exact clone to the new drive (no automatic partition size - Macrium Reflect works nicely)
  3. Boot into Windows on the new drive
  4. Use the Windows disk manager to resize the partitions (for more control moving/resizing partitions use MiniTool Partition Wizard)

The main thing is to avoid letting the cloning software auto resize/move partitions, particularly if you have a non-standard partition layout, manufacturer recovery partition, etc.

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+1 for using Macrium Reflect.

My main system has a Windows install dating back to 2011 which has been upgraded through 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11 and Reflect has been used to migrate that across various SATA SSD upgrades and more recently moving to NVMe and then a different NVMe drive. Every time, the process has worked smoothly and perfectly (I upgrade as-and-when a new version of Reflect comes out, since I also use Reflect for my on-machine backups).

How are you going to clone the NVMe drive? Do you have multiple m.2 slots on your motherboard? If not, either get a PCIe adapter to mount it, or get a USB-C to m.2 NVMe adapter. I have a cheap ORICO enclosure, but be warned, if you do this, use the very short USB-C cable they supply with it.