davidm671 Posted May 27, 2019 Share Posted May 27, 2019 (edited) Hi, I have a Dell XPS 13 that I recently upgraded or replaced the motherboard with a slightly newer version such that I could have NVME drive support. Anyhow after the installation of the board every thing went well but I wanted to transfer the OS from the SATA WD Blue M.2 drive onto an NVME drive. So I used Macrium Reflect free version to image all 6 or 7 partitions that were on the drive. Yes Dell has like half dozen partitions from the ESP partition, Diags partition, No Name partition, WinRe Tools parition, C drive partition, No Name, and the PBR Image partition. Next I booted into the Macrium emergency recovery environment after installing the nvme drive and restored the whole image back on. Seemed like everything was good but instead Windows spin'd its wheels and after a while rebooted into 'Attempting to repair your drive' mode which did nothing. I tried booting into a dos window from the advanced options menu and attempted repairs on the boot sector but that didn't work. I ran diskpart however and noticed that my Windows partition was some other letter than C. Not sure if that was important. I even tried a fresh install but even though that worked I ended up getting random bluescreens. Read that Dell has specific drivers it needs installed or else its BSODs all day. Rather restore my SATA drive thats stable and because years of work is on the drive. Anyhow over my head and not sure whats going. Just ordered a Samsung SM961 and should have it by Tues day because I read thats very compatible to the hardware. Going to try another cloning utility. If anyone could help I would appreciate it. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DevTech Posted May 27, 2019 Share Posted May 27, 2019 28 minutes ago, davidm671 said: Hi, I have a Dell XPS 13 that I recently upgraded or replaced the motherboard with a slightly newer version such that I could have NVME drive support. Anyhow after the installation of the board every thing went well but I wanted to transfer the OS from the SATA WD Blue M.2 drive onto an NVME drive. So I used Macrium Reflect free version to image all 6 or 7 partitions that were on the drive. Yes Dell has like half dozen partitions from the ESP partition, Diags partition, No Name partition, WinRe Tools parition, C drive partition, No Name, and the PBR Image partition. Next I booted into the Macrium emergency recovery environment after installing the nvme drive and restored the whole image back on. Seemed like everything was good but instead Windows spin'd its wheels and after a while rebooted into 'Attempting to repair your drive' mode which did nothing. I tried booting into a dos window from the advanced options menu and attempted repairs on the boot sector but that didn't work. I ran diskpart however and noticed that my Windows partition was some other letter than C. Not sure if that was important. I even tried a fresh install but even though that worked I ended up getting random bluescreens. Read that Dell has specific drivers it needs installed or else its BSODs all day. Rather restore my SATA drive thats stable and because years of work is on the drive. Anyhow over my head and not sure whats going. Just ordered a Samsung SM961 and should have it by Tues day because I read thats very compatible to the hardware. Going to try another cloning utility. If anyone could help I would appreciate it. Thanks 1. stay calm, people here will help you. 2. please provide your XPS model number, or your service tag. 3. Any recent Samsung should be fine. (and good) 960 EVO, 960 Pro, 970 EVO, 970 EVO Plus, 970 Pro and the OEM variants 951, 961 etc - the 970 EVO PLUS currently provides the best performance for most tasks at same cost as other options. There is actually NOTHING SPECIAL about the OEM 961 - it is just slightly LESS performant in order to save the OEM (Dell) a few bucks, but thankfully for you the performance difference is small. 4. fresh install is best. Make sure NO other drives or USB externals are connected during the basic install to prevent a boot partition being created on a different drive. If the drive has NEVER been partitioned or formatted before, try to leave 10 gigs or so UNALLOCATED at the end of the drive by creating a slightly small partition - this will create SPARE FLASH CELLS for extra drive longevity. 5. you will save yourself some upgrade time by using a fresh ISO of 1903. 6. before your install, you can collect all the Dell drivers by using your Dell Service Tag but very few of them will actually be useful, if any. 7. Once all is working, you can copy your data over from the OLD WD Blue drive by using an external case. And just forget that all those stupid extra Dell partitions ever existed - nothing useful on them! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel F. Administrators Posted May 27, 2019 Administrators Share Posted May 27, 2019 If the drive has NEVER been partitioned or formatted before, try to leave 10 gigs or so UNALLOCATED at the end of the drive by creating a slightly small partition - this will create SPARE FLASH CELLS for extra drive longevity If you use the Samsung evo support page you can download the specific evo nvme driver (the ms one is a bit basic) and download the magician Software you can allocate spare space through the friendly interface, see the state of the drive and more DevTech 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goretsky Supervisor Posted May 28, 2019 Supervisor Share Posted May 28, 2019 Hello, Like @DevTech I recommend performing a fresh install of the operating system so that you do not have these kinds of issues in the first place, but one likely reason for this problem is that the computer did not have the NVMe device drivers installed prior to cloning, so it did not recognize that new drive technology when it booted up for the first time off of the cloned NVMe drive. You can try putting the Western Digital M.2 SATA SSD back into the computer and installing the device drivers for your NVMe SSD to it manually, and then try cloning the drive again to the NVMe SSD and seeing if that at least allows it to boot successfully afterwards. Keep in mind that even if it does work, since you installed a different model of motherboard into your computer (the Dell XPS 13 is a laptop isn't it?), it may have other different hardware inside, or even the same chips but updated revisions, that require different device drivers than those used with the original motherboard, so you may have some driver compatibility issues to hunt down after it is stable enough to boot. It will probably be less time-consuming, though, for you to perform a clean install of Windows 10 Version 1903 as previously-noted, get that fully-patched and updated, then get whatever software you need installed, updated and configured, and copy your data over from the old Western Digital M.2 2280 SATA SSD to the new NVMe SSD. You might want to even look into getting a USB 3.0/1 to M.2 SATA enclosure, so you can use the old Western Digital M.2 2280 SATA SSD as a backup drive for any important data files. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anibal P Posted June 1, 2019 Share Posted June 1, 2019 Cloning is never a good idea, i know it will ###### some people off, but it's true Get Windows from MS, install it and after that hop on over to Dell's support site and get any system drivers you need My system runs much better going this route and not installing all the crap Dell installs on their systems Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mindovermaster Moderator Posted June 1, 2019 Moderator Share Posted June 1, 2019 31 minutes ago, Anibal P said: Cloning is never a good idea, i know it will ###### some people off, but it's true Get Windows from MS, install it and after that hop on over to Dell's support site and get any system drivers you need My system runs much better going this route and not installing all the crap Dell installs on their systems Yeah, the bloatware they add onto it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim K Global Moderator Posted June 1, 2019 Global Moderator Share Posted June 1, 2019 All you gotta do is take care of it. I haven't reinstalled Windows on this desktop since I put it together back in 2012. ...and that was going from a mechanical drive, to a small SSD to a larger SSD (all cloned). I want to say I just used the EaseUS cloning software. Edit: 1809 on 12/24/18 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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