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Question

How to Swap SSD and Reboot With a Back-Up Image of Original

by Jul 16, 2016 8:17PM PDT

I recently got a new Lenovo 13 with middle of the road specs and am upgrading the RAM and storage.

The RAM was a breeze and no problem.

The storage on the other hand is worrying me. I am pretty novice and need some advice on how to go about swapping the SSD. From other posts I concluded that I want to make a back-up image of the current SSD and use that to reboot the new one once installed.

So my question is how do I go about doing this. I understand how to make a back-up image onto an external drive, but beyond that am not entirely sure what to do.

Do I need to make a recovery disk? And if so can it be a bootable USB because the Lenovo 13 doesn't have a disk drive.

Would really appreciate a step-by-step run down of how to do this, or a link to something along those lines.

Thanks for any advice.

Discussion is locked

4 Posts
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Answer
I used a kit for this work.
by Forum moderator Jul 17, 2016 11:56AM PDT

I bought the now under 30 buck APRICOM disk cloning kit. It's very nice and makes it easy.

As to the recovery disk, I can't tell which OS so I can't give a nod to a web page on how or if it's in the product manual.

Are you reporting the recovery media creation steps are not on the maker's web site or manual?
Once in a while folk will ask for others to copy that in a reply.

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Answer
I also used a kit and i've done it like
by Jul 19, 2016 6:18AM PDT

5 times. The kit provides the USB external case and the Imaging software (Acronis True Image is what i used). One thing of note is the external case was USB 2 and when I connected to a USB 3 port it didn't work. So make your your external case USB ports match what the machine has. What is did was I put the new drive in the case and made it the TARGET drive in Acronis. The old drive was the SOURCE. I set it to create an image and when it finished I removed the old drive an put the new one in. It booted perfectly and I then moved the old drive to the second drive bay. I also did it with my Alienware 18 which came with a 256 MSATA SSD and I replaced with a 1 TB MSATA SSD. I now use the original 256 GB SSD in the external case as a external drive.

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Answer
Another thing
by Jul 19, 2016 6:19AM PDT

Newegg or Tiger Direct will have external drive enclosures cheaper than Best Buy.

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I'll add Amazon here
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jul 19, 2016 7:37AM PDT

Has a lot of cases too.

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