Tag: clone disk

Upgrading from m.2 SATA to Crucial NVMe drive on Latitude 7490

Scenario:

Dell Latitude 7490 with existing SATA m.2 SSD. We want to upgrade to larger NVMe drive (Crucial 1Tb).

First tried new drive in Startech NVMe USB enclosure (M2E1BMU31C). Downloaded Crucial cloning software (locked version of Acronis). Problem – not recognised as Crucial drive so Acronis won’t run.

Posts suggest that the new drive should be installed in the laptop first and the system booted via USB. So take current drive out and put it in a SATA USB m.2 enclosure. Attach this to USB-C port and reboot.

This doesn’t work. What does work is attaching it to a USB-A port instead. Then it boots with no intervention.

After that the disk was clones (with no reboot necessary!), the old dive disconnected and the system booted happily from the new drive.

Cloning Mac disk using external enclosure and Disk Utility

We got a ssd upgrade for a Mac (JetDrive 885) which comes with an enclosure to allow data to be copied to the new drive. This can be done with Disk Utility – as you are cloning the boot drive you need to run this in recovery mode (boot holding cmd – r). Presumably booting from a usb stick would work as well.

Once in disk utility choose the external drive, select Restore and choose to restore from the Macintosh HD. At this point we ran into an issue:

Could not change the partition type for /dev/disk1s1 - error -5342

We eventually found the problem – the new ssd had been configured with a MBR partition table, not GPT. To fix this go to the View menu and choose Show All Devices. Then select the external device at the top level and click erase. This should allow you to choose MBR or GPT partition schemes.