Transfering my W10 OS from my SATA SSD to my new M.2 SSD, best method?

[Tommygunn]

Hi,
Long time since I've been here so I'm somewhat rusty with various methods of this, that and the other.

I've just bought a Samsung 1TB M.2 SSD and I want to transfer/replicate my W10 OS and Games partitions, from my current SATA SSD, to my new M.2.

The problem I have, is that I don't have my W10 USB fob due to a recent house move, therefore, I'm looking to find a way to do a transfer/copy of all the data to the new drive while retaining full functionality of the OS and games.

So far, I have partitioned the new drive to similarly replicate the original drive, albeit simply 'OS' and 'Games'. I've done a simple copy and paste of the games partition (yet to see if that works), and I've attempted to do the same with the OS, however, it doesn't want to copy/paste some files out of the thousands and so prevents the OS from working when the new M2 is selected as the principle drive and it just reverts back to the BIOS options.

Any help much appreciated.

Below are a couple of screengrabs of my current drives.

Cheers,
Tom.

 

[hitek84]

I assume you've solved it by now but you need to use disk cloning software to easily do this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/186uico

Best disk cloning software of 2025: ranked, rated and reviewed by experts

The best disk cloning software helps make creating digital backups easy

www.techradar.com

 

[Toothless]

Samsung has software for this. Look up their migration tool.

 

[Solaris17]

Samsung has software for this. Look up their migration tool.

Pretty much all of them do and they dont even care if your working with those specific disks as long as one is detected.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Macrium Reflect has a free 30-day trial (or they used to, not sure now) and I used it a couple weeks ago for exactly what's described here, clone SATA W10 install to NVMe and it worked perfectly.

 

[arbiter]

The problem that might come up is difference in driver or some specific changes that might be made to windows install that will insta BSOD on boot. Sata had 2 modes that i think UEFI and legacy IDE that if you switched in bios would cause windows do freak out and do that. So be aware of cloning an sata based SSD to NVME might come with similar kinda issues. When i moved from my 870 evo 1tb SSD to 980 pro NVME i took the opportunity to just fresh install since its been a long time since i did but i was also doing a full pc update with new cpu and board as well.

So make sure not to delete anything from that SSD til you 100% know it boots and runs without issue after the clone.

 

[Tommygunn]

Sorry, this got lost in the notifications.
I actually got it sorted with Macrium Reflect (for the transfer) and Minitool Wizard (for partitioning resizing), all worked out perfectly.

Thanks.