[SOLVED] Can't see new M.2 drive in external USB case.

[excitron]

Hi folks, I bought a 512 gig M.2 drive to replace a smaller 128 gig M.2 drive in a Windows 10 laptop I just got. I took out the internal 128 gig M.2 drive from the laptop and put it in the external M.2 case. I then made an image file of it using Clonezilla on my desktop machine booting off a Clonezilla thumb drive, and then took the 128 gig drive out and proceeded put the new 512 gig drive in the external case to write the image file to.

However the system does not see the new M.2 drive. I can't partition or format it because it simply doesn't show up. I then put the new 512 gig M.2 drive in the internal laptop drive bay where the original Windows M.2 drive was and booted from a Linux Mint thumb drive to see if I could see it there, but I still can't see the drive on the laptop either.

Any reasons why this drive doesn't show up anywhere?
Thanks.

 

[USAFRet]

What specific drive?
What specific external case?

There are easier ways of doing that migration thing.

 

[excitron]

What specific drive?
What specific external case?

There are easier ways of doing that migration thing.

Thanks for your reply. Well, the drive is a 512 gig Inland drive inserted into a Vantec external case. I wanted to make an image file of the 128 gig drive that came inside a Motile M141 laptop.

So here's what I did. Before turning the laptop on for the first time, I opened it up and took the M.2 drive out and put it in the Vantec case. I connected to to my Win 7 desktop, which saw it just fine. I then made an image file of the 128 gig drive using a Clonezilla boot USB stick, and saved the image file to my Win 7 machine. I then put the 512 gig M.2 drive in the Vantaec case and plugged it into the desktop, and I could not see the drive, so I could not add a partition and format it.

After trying various things, I put the 128 drive back in the Motile and started up the Win 10 initialization process. Thinking Win 7 may have a problem seeing M.2 drives , I put the 512 SSD in the Vantec case, and connected it to the Motile laptop. Nothing.

However, the Motile laptop, bless it's little electronic soul, has of all things, a SECOND M.2 drive slot. So I put the 512 gig drive in that, and Win 10 saw it and formatted it. So now I had two drives in the system. Thinking I could now see partitioned and formatted drive back in the Vantec case, I put the 512 drive in it, but neither my Win 7 nor the Motile laptop could see the drive I had just formatted while in the Vantec case. I then put the 512 drive back in the laptop, where it could see it again.

So I copied the image file I had made to the laptop's C: drive, booted from the Clonezilla drive, and installed the image file on the 512 drive. I then pulled out the 128 drive, put the 512 drive in it's place, started up the laptop , but it could not see the drive and wound up in the BIOS setup screen. So I DISKPART the 512 drive, removed the image partitions, reformatted it back in the laptop, and for the immediate moment I have the two drives running in the laptop.

One thing I noticed however is the the laptop's 128 drive has two notches in the contacts tab that slides into the M.2 slot, while the 512 drive only has one notch. I don't know what that means, but I suspect it has something to do with the drive not being able to be seen. What do you think?

Thanks again for your reply

 

[USAFRet]

The Inland drive is NVMe, the Vantec enclosure only supports a SATA drive.
https://www.vantecusa.com/products_detail.php?p_id=214

It will not work.

 

[excitron]

Hmm, interesting. So the Motile laptop has two M.2 slots so it could accommodate either format, because the Inland drive doesn't work in the slot that the original drive was in, but it works in the secondary slot. This was throwing me off, as I could see it in the laptop's second slot but not in the other slot or the external case.

I will try dumping the image file into it again and booting from the second slot to see if the system will boot to it.

Thanks for your help.

 

[USAFRet]

Yes.
Not all M.2 ports or external enclosures are SATA+NVMe.
Often, they are one or the other.