Replace M.2 NVMe Drive Nitro 5 AN515-53 2018

SteveM22 · June 2022

My son's Nitro 5 from 2018 came with a 256Gb NVMe. We later added a 1Tb SSD in the expansion bay.
Now I'm trying to replace the stock NVMe drive with a new 1Tb NVMe.

Here's what I did so far:
I removed the 1Tb SSD and replaced it with a blank 750GB HDD.
I used FarStone Drive Clone to clone the NMVe to the HDD.
I removed the NVMe drive and left the HDD in the machine figuring that upon reboot, it would detect that this drive is now the bootable drive.
I get a "No Bootable Device" popup when I boot.
If I use F12, there are no bootable options shown.
If I go to the UEFI options, I don't see any options to set the boot order. I see the screen where it would be possible but it is blank, i.e. there are no options like you would expect, USB, Network boot, CD, etc...

I'm currently stuck.
I figured I would clone the NVMe to the HDD. Then insert the new NVMe and clone from the HDD to that.

I've tried running the Windows Recovery from USB to do the bootrec /fixboot process and then rebuilding the bcd. No luck there.

I also have some Linux live USB, but using Boot Repair also did not fix the boot issue.

Thoughts?
Thanks.

brummyfan2 · June 2022

Hi,
You could give this a try:
Download and install Macrium Reflect free, backup the image of 256GB M.2 SSD to an external HDD, create a bootable USB disk with Macrium, replace the 256GB with the 1TB M.2 SSD, insert the bootable disk, go to BIOS and make the USB disk as your first boot device, recover the image from external HDD to the new SSD.
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7363/macrium-reflect-is-a-free-and-easy-to-use-backup-utility/

SteveM22 · June 2022

Hi brummyfan2. Thanks for the info. I had put in my question and did some more searching and had found that same suggestion on the Dell site. I'm in the process of doing that now.

brummyfan2 · June 2022

SteveM22 said:

Hi brummyfan2. Thanks for the info. I had put in my question and did some more searching and had found that same suggestion on the Dell site. I'm in the process of doing that now.

No problem

SteveM22 · June 2022

Macrium did solve my problem. However, I couldn't find the image file to restore from. Luckily, I just ran the fix boot problems process and that resolved it for me. When I used Drive Clone, it looks like it failed to properly copy the EFI partition. The original drive had about 100 Mb, but the copy only had 512 Kb. Once I ran the Boot Fix, it rebooted and then properly started in Windows.