Clone Sata SSD to NVME?

I am upgrading my moms computer with a new motherboard and cpu. I am planning to give her a 250gb 960evo in place of her 850 evo 250gb. So I am wanting the same installation of windows. So she doesn’t lose anything. How should I go about transferring the 850 to the 960? Create a system backup is my hunch and restore via the 960. But I am not sure if that will do what I want it to.

I did use Samsung’s tool to do that and it ended up failing and erasing ONLY the part it managed to fail

Dont use that at least

No clue what it is about cloning to NVMe, I can never get it to boot properly. I would just do a fresh install but a backup and restore would probably be your best bet.
The data was all there but and I was able to boot into it but had to first load up a windows 10 install USB and boot from that bootloader otherwise I would be staring at a black bios screen with no disk detected.
Sorry if this is a some what useless response.
I have used Acronis True Image bundled with my Adata SSD’s and Mini Tool Partition Wizard.

I also used Samsung tool and my windows system started breaking randomly throughout the next week. I think it is best with a fresh install when at all possible. Backup what data you need and start making that USB disk

In the past I have cloned all drives with Macrium Reflect. I’ve never had a drive fail and I have cloned 20+ drives.
Not to NVMe but I have cloned HDD’s to SSD, SSD to HDD, and SSD to SSD.
I have even cloned SD to SD and SD to SSD.
SATA vs NVMe shouldn’t matter in any way.

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If possible please:

If that’s really not possible use:

and expect some sort of weird problems later on.

Forgive my redundancy in the thread but it can’t be stated enough, Clean Install…

Clonezilla and do an offline clone. None of the windows utilities can do it because files are locked when windows is running.

Or does clonezilla not support NVMe? It should.
Never had issues with cloning a windows drive with it (DD method because… why not I guess)…

I’ve used Macrium Reflect Free on multiple occasions, works fine.

Used to use Acronis True Image, but then the software got seriously buggy. And before that the age-old Partition Magic, which was amazing but Symantec bought it and killed it.

Tbh I don’t even risk it anymore with online cloners, not worth my time. Just DD that shit and resize partition ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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:+1:

I’m fairly sure I did this (wow, what a bad memory):

SSD image to other HDD (if no room on SSD
Plug in NVMe and restore to it.
Remove old SSD.

Good luck!

ADDITIONAL: I must have used macrium reflect over a 500 times by now. Always worked, unless there was user or a bad hardware error.

See if you can install the necessary nvme drivers ahead of time (maybe plug the SSD and nvme device at the same time and ensure you can format the nvme device). You should just be able to use AOMEI and clone the SSD to the nvme while the system is live (it uses the shadow copy API in Windows).

Then reboot, disconnect the SSD and set the boot device to the NVME drive. You might have to re-register the UEFI variables (a good BIOS lets you do this in the boot menu). It should boot right up.

YASSSS.

use DD.

I would be cautious using DD, it’s pretty important to align your partitions properly when cloning to a SSD or you can lose a bunch of performance.

If both disks are the exact same block count it should work but otherwise you would need to finagle alignment by creating a blank partition of a number of blocks at the top of the drive to ensure your main partition is properly aligned. That’s the kind of thing I would avoid doing by hand.

I was thinking about cloning to make the transition smoother. My mom uses outlook and whenever we have done a clean install I have lost her drafts, sent emails and contacts. I have exported everything and attempted at importing them to outlook, but I always get half of the stuff working and the rest not. That is why I am wanting to clone the entire drive.