Solved HDD Upgrade/Cloning/etc.

My question is similar to the one here: SSD Clone Question(s) - Windows 11 but that thread has been overtaken with Overprovisioning which doesn't concern me.

I have an HP Laptop that has a 512GB NVMe drive and as far as I know only one NVMe slot. I ordered a 2TB drive that I was assured from HP is compatible with the system. I also ordered a USB-C enclosure for the drive that should arrive today (before the new drive next week).

I own Macrium Reflect and understand it should be able to clone the drive, but I'm unsure how. My goal is to obviously clone and replace the 512GB. If there are 2 NVMe slots I want the 512GB as a secondary (blank) drive when I'm done, if not, I'll keep it as an external backup and blank it then. My understanding is that since the drives are different sizes I need to adjust the space during the cloning process before it does the recovery partition (and any other partitions there may be). Again, I'm unsure what I'm doing so if someone can give me instructions that would be greatly appreciated. I used to be a system builder so you don't have to dumb it all down, but due to medical issues, my memory is pretty much shot which is why this is so hard for me and why I don't want to mess up.

On a desktop PC, where you can connect the new drive and just clone the old drive to the new one, it's a piece of cake.
But with a laptop, with just one drive bay, it's always been a horse of a different color.
The method that I've used, for years, is to boot up the laptop with my Backup & Restore bootable media, usually a flash drive and make a true copy of the HD in the laptop to some removable media. (Disk to Image)

Then swap drives, and from the removable media Restore the backup to the new drive, (Image to Disk) now residing inside the laptop.
If anything goes wrong, you still have your original drive, untouched!
When using the right program, it's a piece of cake.

Sorry, I have no experience with NVMe drives, but the above technique should still work.

Good Luck, mate!

I did the cloning/drive swap before Christmas, just forgot to mark it solved since no one posted a response. Sorry about that.

Make a Macrium USB flash drive rescue disk. Make sure you can boot the laptop from it. Clone the installed SSD to the SSD in the USB enclosure. Swap the drives. Worry about resizing partitions later. If the SSD fails to boot after the swap, boot from the rescue flash drive and run the Macrium utility to fix boot problems. You'll be fine.

NavyLCDR said:

Make a Macrium USB flash drive rescue disk. Make sure you can boot the laptop from it. Clone the installed SSD to the SSD in the USB enclosure. Swap the drives. Worry about resizing partitions later. If the SSD fails to boot after the swap, boot from the rescue flash drive and run the Macrium utility to fix boot problems. You'll be fine.

Click to expand...

Read that post ahead of yours. He already solved the issue.