Replacing my Laptop's SSD

I wanted to update my internal hard drive to have more space so I could game more and have all my music on one place. I ran into more obstacles than expected.

Buying the Wrong Drive

For one thing, I made the mistake of buying the wrong form factor the first time. I watched a video taking apart what seemed like the same model and saw they used a 2.5-inch SATA SSD, so I figured that must be it. I had opened my computer before and seen the little cage that I figured must be holding the SSD - why else would it be so big?

Imagine my shock opening my computer to find out that it’s NVMe M.2. I decided to repurpose the SSD for another project and went with Crucial for the NVMe. My computer did not have a second NVMe slot to have two in at a time, so I had to buy an enclosure.

The Cloning Plan Falls Apart

I formatted and initialized the Crucial disk. Then I went to the Acronis True Image cloning software. It said it could not find the disk. How was this possible?

Many forum threads later, I found that you are supposed to have the Crucial inside the laptop and the old SSD in the enclosure. I was prepared to move ahead until I saw people saying you ought to make a backup. Since the SSD was being used for something else, I had to make the backup on another Crucial NVMe.

I then made a bootable media backup of my computer using Veeam (Bare Metal Recovery).

Several Months Later

Several months passed where I was occupied with other things and I did not need to use my Thinkpad. Once things cleared up, I set about to tackling the project again. I swapped out my old SSD for the new one. I went into the BIOS, changed the boot order, and disabled secure boot. I was surprised to find that my computer could not boot from the old SSD in the enclosure. It booted fine from inside but in the enclosure, it didn't seem to work. This was puzzling!

I then tried booting from the backup instead. Surprisingly, that worked. I used the bootable media to boot into Windows on the new SSD. I did not end up needing to use Acronis True Image, which I'd been prepared to.

What was left was to change the partition. My C: drive still had the limit of 270 GB. But there was a recovery partition in between the C: and the unallocated terabyte, so I couldn’t just extend it. I followed a guide on how to move the recovery partition to the end (by deleting it and recreating it) so I didn’t have to download any more sketchy software. Finally, I had my terabytes of data.

The only problem is my backup was several months old, so it was missing some files. Not a huge deal, mostly some gaming-related ones.

What I Learned

Always check the specs on your computer before buying anything. Models can vary more than expected.

While buying the second SSD was a lot, I did appreciate the sense of security it gave me while doing this migration.

Don't become too attached to any one piece of software. Trying out the (free!) Veeam made everything much easier.