An 120 Gb SSD for C: should be more than sufficient. In my case W10 + many programmes use 36 Gb space. If space consideration is the motive for setting up your dual boot, an easier way might be to clean up your C: and to reconsider some settings.
Your F: drive is not a system partition. In a command prompt (admin) run:
diskpart
select disk 1
create part EFI size=100
format fs=fat32 quick
assign letter=t
exit
bcdboot F:\Windows /s t: /f ALL
exit
If any of the commands above fail, do not move on to the next command, just post the failure here. That will create a system partition on your HDD and add the boot files to it. When you restart your computer, the HDD should now show up as a boot option in your UEFI boot menus. I suggest you use the override menu the first time. It's usually F12 when the first computer manufacturer's logo appears when restarting the computer.
A couple of weeks ago I imaged not cloned a regular ssd to an external HD then removed it and installed a NVME m2 in the laptop and restored the image all with macrium. I personally do not use clones.
I may end up doing that. There were a couple of reasons I did not go that route to start with (1) Previous bad experience of doing clean installs onto HP hardware .. never being able to find the correct drivers for the machine on the HP websites - and their appaling customer support (2) Samsung told me that the Evo would not work without their drivers installed (I have not verified this myself. So there may be a practical issue of installing an OS onto the EVO .
That may also be an option for me if the current method does not work. But tell me - was that NVME m.2 a Samsung? Because Samsung are telling me that these won't work in a machine that does not have correct drivers installed. So however the operating system is replicated onto the Evo - once it goes back in the machine it won't work. I admit this all sounds flaky .. I can't imagine why the Evo needs special drivers .. but that it what Samsung are saying
The biggest question is whether or not your laptop supports NVMe from the UEFI firmware (BIOS) or not. If your laptop does not support NVMe from the firmware, then any NVMe drive would require the NVMe driver to work regardless of if it was a Samsung or not, which means you won't be able to boot from the NVMe drive, you would have to boot from a SATA drive first.
If your laptop does support NVMe in firmware, than the Samsung EVO drive does not require any special driver.
And actually @entelecheia, instead of just going around in circles, probably the bigger question is what exactly are you planning on doing?
The task should be trivial - but has turned out to be very difficult. I simply want to upgrade the M.2 SSD system disk on my laptop for a much larger drive. I expected to do this by plugging the new SSD into a USB port in a caddy. I did this - and Windows recognised the disk perfectly. However, Samsung's operating system clone utility refuses to recognise their drive on the end of a USB caddy.
So I used Macrium reflect to clone my main, system SSD onto the new Samsung SSD. But when I plugged into into the M.2 slot on my laptop it would not boot up. I contacted Samsung and their 'technical support' said that this would not work as you cannot boot from their drive unless their driver is installed. So I re-installed the original SSD, booted up and attempted to load their driver. But their installation programme detects that you have no Samsung drive plugged in and refuses to install. Catch 22. The rest is explained above .. it seems a lot of hassle for what should be a simple task .. but I can't find anything simpler.
I have wasted hours trying to upgrade to this blasted Evo 970 .. and Samsung have no interest that there is no route to upgrade to their drive on a laptop with a single M.2 slot.
Trying to solve that Catch-22... While running your existing system (forgot to read back... guess SATA SSD), install your new M.2 SSD.
- Now install Samsung driver
- Make Macrium Image of system with installed driver on external drive
- remove your SATA drive and boot from Macrium USB (or Kychi's rescue drive) and put Image on your Samsung SSD
- restart... if system won't boot, boot again from USB and let Macrium repair boot
So .. my existing system is running on the current SSD in the single M.2 slot on the laptop. If I remove that drive - then the system will not boot. I only have a single M.2 slot on my laptop. I am trying to upgrade the SSD in that slot (running the operating system) to a new, much larger SSD.
This is why I am trying to move my existing operating system to the HDD on the laptop and boot from that. Then I can remove the existing SSD, install the new Evo 970 SSD, install the driver, copy back the operating system to that new SSD, then finally change the boot order back to boot off of the new, upgraded SSD.
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