Changing drive letters, copying data and "swapping" drive hardware

Hi.

I have an ASUS MB that has a DIMM.2 slot. I have 2 x M.2 drives on that riser - they are drives D: and E: My (Windows) C: drive is a separate M.2 directly on the MB. Everything has been running fine for about a year. Today I am noticing some flakiness with the E: drive...Unable to access certain directories and complaints about hardware not found. (The exact popup message escapes me right now.) A shutdown, power off and restart have fixed that for the moment.

I've read about failing DIMM.2 riser cards and I'd like to remove that one from my system.

I also have F: and G: SATA SSD drives installed that are empty. I'd like to copy the D: drive to the F: drive AND the E: drive to the G: drive. Then I'd like to relabel F: to D: and G: to E: and then remove the DIMM.2 riser.

I'd appreciate some advice on the "how to do" and "what order to do" this swap. The are some applications installed on the D: and E: drive. I get the feeling it might not be as simple as copy the files over, relabel the drives and quickly reboot.

Thanks

Hello and welcome to the forum. No not as simple as copying files. Why not use backup software capable of imaging the drives. Then restore the drive images to which ever drive you like. I far prefer this method over cloning drives. In fact, I never clone. It's caused me too many problems.

Relabeling the drive if you wish to change something is no problem as you can do that in disk management.

If you are going to clone, choose a reliable tool for the job. The same applies to every task, use the correct tool for the job.

glasskuter said:

Hello and welcome to the forum. No not as simple as copying files. Why not use backup software capable of imaging the drives. Then restore the drive images to which ever drive you like. I far prefer this method over cloning drives. In fact, I never clone. It's caused me too many problems.

Relabeling the drive if you wish to change something is no problem as you can do that in disk management.

Click to expand...

I've only cloned a drive a couple of times in recent years, but it went well both times. Once was using proprietary software provided for free by Samsung, the other using the paid version of Macrium Reflect.

On the other hand, imaging a drive before a hardware swap is a good idea for its own sake.

I keep software on the boot drive, so the other drives need not be cloned; I just copy the data over.

Thanks everyone, I will update you as soon as I can get to this - probably this weekend.

To avoid the intermediate and unneccessary steps of creating, then applying an image, reliable os migration is performed by diskgenius ( free version is fine )