Solved Clone a drive to another without removing it from a laptop.

Hi everyone,
I just got a new WD Black SN850X 1TB NVMe SSD. I have put it in my laptop and it works. Now I want to clone the OEM installed drive to this new drive.

As per the picture here, I have 3 drives now as one space was empty for new SSD. 1st one is the OEM installed SSD, 2nd one is the OEM installed HDD and the 3rd one is the WD Black one. I wish to clone "Acer" to "WD" and use "WD" as boot drive without removing any of the drives physically from my laptop. I'll format the OEM drive and use it for storage, games, etc. How do I do it? And which software to use? Or if that's not possible, can I restore a Macrium Reflect backed-up image to this new drive after clean installing Windows 11 onto it?

I'm guessing you have 2 M.2 sockets and 1 sata? I ask because I have never seen a laptop with 3 sata locations/sockets. Or do you have 3 M.2 sockets?

RD Mercer said:

I'm guessing you have 2 M.2 sockets and 1 sata? I ask because I have never seen a laptop with 3 sata locations/sockets. Or do you have 3 M.2 sockets?

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Yes, 2 M.2 sockets and 1 SATA which has the HDD.

You should be able to do this with most any cloning software, using a flash drive in a usb port, I know Acronis True Image can do this. I would discourage you from booting with 2 operating systems on two separate drives, so if you are successful with the cloning, I would certainly be formatting the drive you just want to use for storage right after you have seen the cloning is good to go on the WD drive. Some here say booting with 2 OS's on different drives is ok, well it's always corrupted one of the OS"s on one of the drives in my case.

after you clone the drive - remove or disable the OEM Drive - to verify cloned drive works...
- then delete every OEM Drive partition and reallocate the drive with Partitions..

IMO I prefer imaging over cloning. There are too many reports of cloned drives not booting for my liking. Also with cloning you have to manually rearrange partitions afterwards to use all the extra unallocated space on the larger drive.

Most all imaging softwares can also clone, but not all imaging softwares are equal when it comes to restoring and image such as being able to fixboot problems nor when it comes to allowing you to resize your partitions during a image restore when moving to a larger drive.

glasskuter said:

IMO I prefer imaging over cloning. There are too many reports of cloned drives not booting for my liking. Also with cloning you have to manually rearrange partitions afterwards to use all the extra unallocated space on the larger drive.

Most all imaging softwares can also clone, but not all imaging softwares are equal when it comes to restoring and image such as being able to fixboot problems nor when it comes to allowing you to resize your partitions during a image restore when moving to a larger drive.

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Maybe imaging is better for some, IMO they're really the same thing, cloning doesn't require another drive, but whatever. toots their horn. I guess I mentioned cloning, because I own both an M.2 and sata duplicators, they're just like cloning. I have only used duplicators for a couple years now, never had one issue. Yes, you would have to pull the drives, but my M.2 is on a PCIe card, so it's a lot easier to remove and reinstall. So for doing what HuntyFtw wants to do, I don't know how they would image in their case, doing it the way they want to do this, I guess they could image it to the original OEM drive they want to use for storage, after the fact.

One problem that can arise when you clone from one internal drive to another internal drive is that the second drive may not be accessible as it has the same disk id as original source drive.

However Windows expects each drive to have different disk ids.

You can change the disk id using dism but it is easier to simply remove one of the drives to avoid a clash.

Tried imaging, but Macrium Reflect PE didn't work. Set it up as new now.

HuntyFtw said:

Tried imaging, but Macrium Reflect PE didn't work. Set it up as new now.

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Nothing wrong with cloning a drive other than some feeling it isn't complicated enough for them to recommend. Add that some rather post stories of doom and gloom, rather than recognizing the doom and gloom is less than 1 percent of 100 percent.

I've cloned several drives, and never an issue. Not one. The drive in my system now is cloned. And yes, you can clone to an external drive. It's how I did the mine using an external NVMe enclosure connected to the PC via USB cable.

There are a myriad of clone software options available, some are included with the drive software, some with backups programs. I use Acronis True Image as a backup program, but it also includes a clone tool. Zero issues there.

Yes nothing in life in perfect... doesn't mean it's 100 percent imperfect either. @RD Mercer post 4 and 7 are on point.

Good luck.