[SOLVED] SSD Switch/Upgrade for Lenovo Yoga 730

[Zorozephyr09]

Hi, so I recently got a 1TB SSD from Crucial that will be a replacement for my laptop’s current 256GB SSD (big upgrade, ik). The laptop is a Lenovo Yoga 730 13-inch and both the current and replacement SSDs are M.2 nvme’s. Now, because the Yoga 730 13” only has one slot for an SSD, I was just wondering what the best way was for me to easily and successfully transfer all of the data and the operating system from my current 128GB SSD to the new drive. I've never done anything like this for a laptop, so I wanted check with others before doing anything I might later regret. I did some researching and read about cloning, and that sounds like it may be the most simple way for me to safely get all of my stuff onto the new SSD and having my laptop work just like it did before; I’m mostly unsure about how to deal with moving the laptop’s windows 10 operating system to the new drive. I also have a 2TB external hard drive ready for use if I need a back up, though I don’t know how to even get my current os (if it’s even at all possible) backed up to that external drive. Any help with this would be very much appreciated. Also, if cloning is what I should do, where can I go to get a free and secure cloning program to begin the process? Thanks!

P.S. I posted the same thing to Lenovo support forums to get opinions from their as well, waiting to hear back from both there and here.

 

[Zorozephyr09]

Power OFF, put it in and try to boot from it.

For rebooting how do I go about doing that? Is it something I do from the advanced settings of the laptop? Do I have to choose an option before powering my system off to initiate the reboot from the BIOS? My os is Windows 10 and I'm still more used to using my windows 7 desktop so I'm not so familiar with BIOS/UEFI settings for this os.

 

[USAFRet]

The BIOS is independent of which OS you have installed.
You're just looking for if the USB is in the chain somewhere. It should be.

 

[Zorozephyr09]

The BIOS is independent of which OS you have installed.
You're just looking for if the USB is in the chain somewhere. It should be.

So to test the rescue USB, do I need to access the BIOS at all? I still don't know what the procedure for testing it is.

 

[Zorozephyr09]

The BIOS is independent of which OS you have installed.
You're just looking for if the USB is in the chain somewhere. It should be.

Hey USAFRet, so I think I successfully verified that my rescue usb works, as I managed to get my laptop to restart and boot up to show only a window of the Macrium program after choosing a "use a backup drive" option from a restart menu. It was prompting me to choose a location to restore from, and when I X'd out of the window it restarted again and brought back my regular desktop and display.

 

[USAFRet]

Yep, working as advertised.

Next up....the Image on your external, and the drive swap...

 

[Zorozephyr09]

Yep, working as advertised.

Next up....the Image on your external, and the drive swap...

So, I was succesfully able to swap my SSDs and transfer the data from my old SSD to the new one. The new SSD, also partitioned in 4-5 sections like my old 256GB SSD, now has 905GB of usable storage, which is ample enough considering the extra partitioning work that had to be done before I could begin using my laptop again with the new drive. Using Macrium Reflect really helped with a lot of the inbetween operations, like making a rescue drive/CD from which your PC will boot from after physically swapping drives; from what I read on one article online, making a rescue drive yourself from scratch is a bit more tedious and gives more room for error than just having a program like Macrium that has a build rescue media option already built in. The most important bit of info I learned from this process was to make sure that your system is going to properly make use of all the additional space in the new SSD, which it may not do automatically (at least when restoring from a system image, as in my case). I had to have someone help me with resizing and rearranging the drive partitions after an initial image restore, as after the first go the new drive had been partitioned exactly like the old 256 GB SSD leaving about 693GB as unused/unrecognized space. After reformatting the partitions for the new 1TB SSD correctly, we ran the restore image function a second time and the laptop appears to have properly made use of the entire drive and applied it to my main C: drive partition. I honestly still don't understand the minute details how SSDs and hard drives process data and how partitions work, but I definitely know more about them now than I did prior to doing this drive upgrade. I know I've said it a bunch of times already throughout this thread, but I feel obligated to say thanks again so much for all the help and answers you've given to me throughout this process! It without a doubt would have taken a lot longer for me to get this upgrade done if I hadn't gotten assistance from you on this forum. You're obviously very knowledgeable on this type of subject matter and I'm super grateful for that.