My Dell G3 3590 came with a 500GB SSD that I’m upgrading to a 1TB SSD.

I intend to clone the current drive onto the new drive and then swap them. This will not be a dual boot setup or involve anything external. Just a straight capacity upgrade.

I have the new drive in an external enclosure and have successfully initialized it in Disk Manager.

Now I need to create a simple volume so File Explorer (and the cloning software) will recognize it.

But what do I do about assigning a drive letter? Obviously, it needs to be C: when all is done, but I can’t call it C: while the current drive is active.

What do I call it now and how do I fix it later? Or can I use the “don’t assign a drive letter or drive path” option?

Thanks in advance.

-Rob

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BurtonRW,

The drive letters don’t “stick” with the drive for lack of a better term.

Assign the new drive as D and when you swap it after cloning, the OS will assign it as C.

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
The drive letters don’t “stick” with the drive for lack of a better term.

Assign the new drive as D and when you swap it after cloning, the OS will assign it as C.

I wondered if it might be this simple.

Thanks.

-Rob

You’re welcome. One more thing: I’ve never had good luck cloning drives while using the OS on the drive being cloned. Booting from a USB or CD, then using the cloning software from there has worked every time.

You shouldn't need to do anything with the destination drive as the software will automatically see it and do a sector to sector block copy.

UPDATE: That was easy.

Thanks to Macrium for making functional trialware.

Thanks to Dell for making a laptop chassis that isn’t an overly tangled mess of ribbons and connectors (looking at you HP ).

Thanks to trapper189 and smschulz for confirming what I thought I knew when I didn’t trust my personal knowledgebase to be current.

Took about 45 minutes to clone the drive and 10 minutes to do the swap (only because finding the original SSD (2230) which was completely concealed under it’s clip and then figuring out how to rearrange the clip to secure the new 2280 took an extra minute).

Initial startup resulted in a “windows failed to load properly”, but a quick restart sorted all of that.

Woohoo!

-Rob

Congratulations. Truly.

FOLLOWING UP TO ASK....

Okay, what did I do wrong?

When I popped the original SSD out of the laptop, I put it in the enclosure I had used to clone the new one (which has nothing to do with things other than now you know how I'm connecting it).

There's a particular desktop folder which seems to be missing since I upgraded to Win11, post-SSD upgrade, so I figured I'd look for it on the old SSD.

Plug in the old SSD and it's bitlocker encrypted. I sure as hell didn't do that and I damned well don't have the 48 character key.

Tried exploring using Macrium Reflect, and it shows the primary partition as being bitlocker encrypted.

How did that happen? Did Windows do that to me somehow? Or Dell? Or Macrium?

What would happen if I reinstalled the old SSD?

HELP!

Thanks.

-Rob

I would put the old SSD back in the computer to recover the file folder.

BUT, I don’t know anything about bitlocker and have no idea what you should do.

Consider the possibility that one way or another you got a (incomplete) ransomware infection during your efforts (perhaps attached to the Macrium download). This could also account for why the folder didn't transfer to the new drive (the xfer software couldn't unlock it). If you don't have the encryption key, your chance of recovery is zero, but I would try the various MAC addresses of various systems on your network as trial keys (MAC Addresses are 48 bits in length) before giving up.

I remember something like this happening to me. If you've ever registered your computer / windows program where the SSD came from on Microsoft account, your bitlocker code is on your Microsoft account.

Below is the directions I just got from my online account:

1. In the navigation header at the top of the page, select Devices.

2. Under Devices, under any device listed, select See details.

3. Under Bitlocker data protection, select Manage recover keys.

4. In the list, locate the device for which you need the key, select the key, and press Ctrl+C to copy it.

I had help back then and their fix was to remove the bitlocker encryption.

Good luck.

quote:

Originally posted by BurtonRW:

How did that happen? Did Windows do that to me somehow? Or Dell? Or Macrium?

LOL .... it was Putin or a Russian Operative.

quote:

What would happen if I reinstalled the old SSD?

Why don't you try it and see what happens?

I don't suppose you could retrieve the errant folder from say a backup ?

Well son of a bitch.

Thanks, RayHRH. You nailed it. I now have access to my bitlocker key for that drive. Still no idea how it was activated (unless somehow it knows if it's separated from the motherboard and locks down automatically).

I only wish I had read your post BEFORE I spent 2 hours watching the file download SLOWLY from my iDrive backup.

-Rob

quote:

Originally posted by BurtonRW:
...somehow it knows if it's separated from the motherboard and locks down automatically).

I think this is the key here. Bitlocker has a presence both in the bios and on the drive. When you separate the two, it activates the protection.
This is how your HDD is protected if someone steals the drive and mounts it a a D: or other letter drive in another machine to harvest data from it.

At least that's how it was explained to me. If it isn't the case, I have no doubt that the PC Police will be along any moment to educate us differently.

I ran into this a few weeks ago when trying to recover someone's data from an M.2 SSD. From what I found then it seems that some business line laptops have it enabled by default.

Here is another possible scenario:
https://www.tenforums.com/anti...d-ssd-my-laptop.html

Per RayHRH’s suggestion (mirrored in the posted link), I did, in fact, find a Bitlocker key in my MS account. I’m going to try to use it this evening. I’m assuming at this point that it will work, but I don’t really need it to since my plan for the old SSD is to leave it in the enclosure and use it as an external HD.

-Rob