Question Upgrading laptop's boot drive, what should I prepare?

[xiaochilao]

My new laptop came with a small PCIE m.2 SSD, which is its only hard drive, and I now want to replace it with a 1TB Crucial P5 Plus. I haven't done this before, but I think I will just physically replace the SSD, and then do a clean install of windows 10 via USB. Is this procedure correct? Or am I missing something? I'm just not sure whether new PCIE SSD need driver or something like that to be recognizable...

 

[dwd999]

One important factor with Windows 10 Secure Boot is that your ssd have a GPT partition identifier. Theoretically if you start the Windows 10 installer with a new drive you should see a popup menu item asking of you want the drive identified as MBR or GPT. If you get that, just select GPT and you should be fine. The Windows 10 installer prefers that all of the space on the ssd be Unallocated, which would be normal with a new ssd. It will then create all of the partitions that it needs to continue the install.

Personally I don't trust the Windows installer that much as I've seen too many people here having problems because their drives were identified as MBR. So I prefer to manually assign the GPT identifier in advance using a program called Gparted which is available either as a standalone ISO that you use to create a bootable usb, or as part of most Linux distros which you can boot from a usb.

GParted -- Download

As the webpage notes, the version labelled amd64 is the one compatible with Secure Boot.

 

[Bob.B]

My new laptop came with a small PCIE m.2 SSD, which is its only hard drive, and I now want to replace it with a 1TB Crucial P5 Plus. I haven't done this before, but I think I will just physically replace the SSD, and then do a clean install of windows 10 via USB. Is this procedure correct? Or am I missing something? I'm just not sure whether new PCIE SSD need driver or something like that to be recognizable...

Does your laptop support pcie4?
If not your wasting your money going to that speed ssd.

Consider cloning your small ssd to a larger ssd.
Minimum of fuss.