Back and restore M.2 SSD using an image

Hello Masters!

I just bought a new notebook which is an inspiron 746, its a dual drive notebook with a normal SATA drive and an M.2 Slot. It uses the M.2 Slot for the primary disk which it boots on. I have a spare M.2 (256GB) which is bigger than the one that came with the notebook (128) and want to swap it out. I want to clone this but i do not have a M.2 enclosure. Is there a possibility to image the stock 128GB M.2 drive and store it on an external drive and restore it on the 256GB drive when installed on the notebook. If yes, what back up/ restore software should i use? thanks!

Macrium Reflect Free:
Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything

Use Macrium to make a full disk image. Then under Other Task - Create Bootable Rescue Media.(USB or CD)
Shutdown system, swap drives and boot from the Rescue Media. It should boot and auto load Macrium. Restore to new disk.

Macrium site has good tutorials.

Jim

Thank you :) much appreciated!

mitchb said:

Thank you :) much appreciated!

Look in our own tutorial section - tutorials on Macrium are super.

Phone Man said:

Macrium site has good tutorials.

Jim

So does our own forum tutorial section. If anything I would say ours by mostly by @Kari are better.

I just did that with a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop that came with an M.2 2280 SSD. Upgraded the M.2 SSD to double the size. As others have noted, I created a backup (disc image) of the existing M.2 SSD, all partitions, using Macrium Reflect. I had a Macrium bootable flash drive so I didn't have to create that. Installed the new M.2 SSD, booted with the Flash drive and restored to the new M.2 SSD. I also used Mini Tool Partition Wizard to expand the "C" partition on the new higher capacity drive to the full drive size. Macrium has been reported it will do that too but I've never tried that. I already had Mini Tool Partition Wizard so I used that.

Use Macrium to make a full disk image. Then under Other Task - Create Bootable Rescue Media.(USB or CD)
Shutdown system, swap drives and boot from the Rescue Media. It should boot and auto load Macrium. Restore to new disk.

Macrium site has good tutorials.

Thanks fixed the issue that I had on my lapto Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th with M.2 SSD cstorage when I tried to upgrade from 128GB to 1 TB