Replacing a M.2 SSD boot drive card

Running Win 10 version 21H1

My rig has a 500 Mb M.2 SSD card as boot (C:\). Troubling Chkdsk runs have caused me to distrust the current card. A replacement M.2 card should arrive in a couple of days and my confidence in myself to successfully swap the cards is limited as I am older now than I was when I started this thread. I AM getting slower.

My MSI B360m Mortar MoBo has provision for two M.2 cards. I am proposing to install the second M.2 card in the empty slot and use Macrium to copy the contents. I'm not sure how to proceed from here. I think I need to re-letter the new card to C:\ and the old card to something else but I'm not sure how to do this.

Suggestions would be appreciated. With any kind of luck, you too will get old.

I did something similar.

I used Acronis True Image to clone the old M.2 drive onto the new. The problem is that makes a duplicate of the old drive. You don't want to have two drives with the same ID present at the same time.

I put the old drive into an external M.2 enclosure and reformatted it there. It never went back into the original PC.

You should be able to use a bootable utility to clear the old M.2 drive for re-use. I have no personal experience with it, but I think that you want GParted -- Live CD/USB/PXE/HD (free, open source).

Thanks for the suggestion. This "old" thing is getting to be a problem. I dimly remember having an external boot utility on a thumb drive but I can't remember the name. If I can boot the box off a USB chip, then I can get into the drive list and change letters.