My brother had been asking about increasing the boot drive on his laptop. As it is running Windows 10, and is from Lenovo, there are usually a number of partitions that need to be considered. I said that generally speaking, I would clone the disk to another larger disk, then move partitions around so that the Windows drive (C:) could be increased in size.
Why is this necessary, you might ask? The C: drive is used by Windows and contains your user profile – as you download content from the internet, your C: drive gets used up and eventually you end up being unable to download files until you clear up space. If you are careful about the way you use your computer, you would diligently move files off or delete files that are no longer needed – those files that you have either created yourself or downloaded yourself, that is.
The process would be clone, move partitions, then extend C: drive. Sounds simple, come to think of it – but therein lies a lot of potential pitfalls. Cloning the wrong disk for example – one of my friends did this many years ago when operating a computer shop, wanted to make a copy of his data, and ended copying a blank new 80GB disk to the data disk, instead of the other way around.
My brother’s laptop was a Lenovo Y520-15IKBN – which has a M.2 NVMe disk for the operating system and a 1TB Sata disk for data. The M.2 was 128GB so he wanted a larger disk, so gave him a few suggestions. He bought a 500GB Samsung 860 EVO – and arranged to get the laptop and SSD to me, which he did on Monday morning.
In the evening, while checking, I find that he hadn’t bought a M.2, but had bought a Sata version. Anyway, after some discussion and him checking the invoice in case he was shipped incorrectly, which was not the case – I found that Umart at West Ryde had the right one in stock, and being Cyber Monday, had a special price on it – if I was quick. I ordered it for collection, so only need to wait for the email that tells me that the order is ready to be picked up.
In the meantime, I opened the laptop – by removing 13 screws as pictured here:
Then turn it over, and open the screen, then lift the front edge up – it should click and a gap should appear between the bottom case and the touchpad area – like this:
Then close the lid gently without closing the case clips again – then place it upside down. To disengage the remaining clips, you can either use a plastic spudger (like the ones supplied with phone battery kits) or use an old credit card. Put the edge into the gap and gently drag the card around, and you should here the clips disengage – click, click click – and do the same on the other end.
Gently lift the bottom cover – rocking up and down – it should then click again, and disengage from the rest of the laptop. The M.2 can be seen at the left of this picture. I removed the holding screw, then slid the M.2 disk away from the socket. Ok – now I have the disk removed. I go to my data recovery PC, removed my existing M.2 disks and installed this one. I left a Sata disk installed, which has Ubuntu Linux on it.
On power up, I press F11 – which for the MSI Z270 Krait Gaming, is to choose the boot menu. In the boot menu, I chose to boot from my linux disk. In Linux, I open a terminal and type in “dmesg | grep sd” which should show me the disks that are visible to Linux during the boot process – funny, I only see sda. Then the penny drops – this M.2 is a NVMe, so now try “dmesg | grep nvme” and now I see that there is a disk device named nvme0n1.
Have I mention that “safety” is my middle name? Actually it isn’t, but you get the idea! First of all, I generally make a copy of the disk before I do anything to it. I checked to see if I had sufficient disk space on my Linux disk, by doing a “df .” command. I had enough – ok. Next, I run the command to copy the SSD to a local file – “dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=./nvme.dd bs=10M” and before I press enter, I double-check that the input file is /dev/nvme0n1 and the output file is the local nvme.dd file. The bs is to tell the dd command to use a blocksize of 10MB. It looks good, then I press enter.
After this was done, I checked that the nvme.dd file was approximately 128GBi in size – yes, so powered off. In due course, I received the email from Umart telling me that my order was ready to pick up. Being a Monday, they are open until 6PM, so after 5PM, I went for a drive to West Ryde, got my SSD, and returned home.
I installed the new 500GB M.2 disk into the second M.2 slot, then this time – I inserted a USB boot disk that had CloneZilla on it. I chose to boot from the USB and used Clonezilla to make a copy of the 128GB disk to the 500GB disk – i.e. choosing the nvme0n1 disk, and writing to the sda disk. I could have just used dd, but wanted to try CloneZilla since that was what others had recommended.
Once the copy was done, the machine powered up – since that was the choice I had made in Clonezilla. Remove USB and plug in Ubuntu Linux again. Booted from Linux, then did a comparison of the two M.2 disks – by running the “sudo fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1” and “sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb”. The same number of partitions were seen, and the same starting blocks also, which means that Clonezilla, just made a copy without adjusting any partitions – just fine.
Power off, remove the original 128GB M.2 disk and put that into the box that the new SSD came out of – just for safe-keeping. Reboot back into Linux, and run “sudo gparted” to move the last partition towards the end, with about 10% space afterwards (although not strictly necessary, it is still recommended not to fully utilize the SSD capacity). Will have some screenshots later on. After this, plug it into the laptop, power up – no OS. What is going on!!? Can’t see the SSD in the Bios either. Tried my other M.2 SSD’s – no go. Put the original NVMe back in, and it works fine. A google search finds that it needs to be a NVMe for the M.2 slot to work.
I should have checked Google before doing all of this, lesson learnt for next time. On checking stock at Umart for the Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe, looks like a couple of days for this, and guess what – it was only $1 more expensive, lol. I ordered it, and also a couple of Seagate 4TB disks for a spare NAS, and now wait for it to be ready.
On Tuesday I got an email that the NVMe was ready. On Wednesday I got an email that the Seagate disks were ready. So, on Thursday I went to Umart and picked everything up.
This morning – Friday, I was able to find some time to do the cloning again. This time from the 128GB NVMe to the 500GB NVMe. One word of caution – previously the 128GB NVMe was /dev/nvme0n1 – however with both NVMe installed on my data recovery PC, the 128GB was /dev/nvme1n1 and the new 500GB was /dev/nvme0n1 – so read the screen properly.
Clonezilla will then ask you to confirm twice before writing to the target disk.
After the cloning was completed, the PC shut down automatically. I then removed the original 128GB NVMe and connected my Linux disk and powered up to Linux. I will show some screenshots of the process of checking the NVMe and for when I used gparted to move the last partition towards the end.
Now I check the partitions using fdisk
After doing this, I shutdown the PC, and then move the NVMe back to the laptop. The next part is done on the laptop itself by running Disk Administrator. The next screenshots will show the process of choosing the Windows partition and extending it.
Now the job has finally been completed. I have two SSD’s now space, a Sata and a M.2 – I will have to find a use for them. That would be another story.
One last thing, I usually vacuum the dust out while I have the laptop open.
I run the vacuum cleaner with a fine bristle brush to get as much of this dust out as possible. Anyway, I hope this helps someone who wants to extend their Windows disk – maybe without the hassle of ordering the wrong products. Then the cover goes back on, and all 13 screws are installed – none leftover, another charity job completed.
R.IT 
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