How to Clone Windows to a New SSD _ No Data Loss

I've got another video on how to migrate Windows to another SSD with no data loss in 2026. Now, if you've got a mini PC or desktop or a laptop that you want to migrate over to a bigger SSD, then I'm going to show you how to do it. Now, I've shown you how to do this with an external SSD enclosure, which you can put SSD NVMe drive into. But in this one, we're going to do it in-house inside the actual mini PC itself. This could be also in a laptop if you have two M.2 slots and this can also be in a desktop if you have two M.2 slots on the board. Now this was requested by Victor so let's take a look at how we can do it. First we're going to need to gain access to... The inside of the mini PC, in this case, we're just going to remove the four screws and we're going to gain access to the insides where the M.2 slot is. Now, it looks like this one is just pressed in with a little bit of pressure on the side. It will clip out. So I'm going to go ahead and do that right here. And this should release the motherboard from the actual case. And it looks like it's just got a little bit of. Pressure on the back there. So let me just release that. There we go. And now we've gained access to it. Now, be careful of the Wi-Fi antennas. Now, this motherboard does have two M.2 slots on it, which do support SSD NVMe drives, which means I can now clone this drive onto a larger NVMe SSD drive, which I can populate on the second M.2 slot here, and then I can swap out these drives. Now, there's also an option for SSD enclosures like this. I've already covered that in a previous video, but Victor said he's tried it and it doesn't work. So I just want to make a video showing you how you can do it in situ if you do have two M.2 slots like this board does support and you don't need an enclosure. So first we're going to need to have to populate this second slot with a larger drive that we're going to clone to. I'm going to go ahead and use this two terabyte drive right here. So I'm going to put this in. And let's go ahead. Now, this also is a good way of upgrading the original drive that's in there if it's a slower Gen 3 drive and you want to use a Gen 4 drive if the board supports Gen 4 and they only put a Gen 3 drive in. This is another good way of upgrading. So let me go ahead and put that into its slot. Now, you can also put a heatsink on here if there is. A faster drive, it might create a bit more heat, so you might want to put something like a heat sink on just to make sure it stays nice and cool, something like that. And it should still close down, and that's exactly what we're going to do here because this Gen 4 drive will be a lot faster and a lot more hotter than the previous drive. So we've got that in situ now what I'm going to do is I'm not going to put it all back together because I want to clone it like this and that way when I've cloned it I can swap out the drives and then finally put it all back together. So I'm just going to rest it over like this as you can see here. The drive is still in there like so and all I'm doing is resting it down like this and I shall do the cloning like this and that will save me having to put it all together and then take it all apart again just to change the drive over. It just saves a bit of time. So let's power it on for the first time. I've got all the cables plugged in, everything I need, for instance, a mouse and keyboard. I've got my capture card on there, and I've also got my ethernet cable and HDMI cable and the power cable to plug in the mini PC. And there you go, it's starting to power up. And what we'll do here is we'll go into the BIOS. I just want to make sure that the drive is recognizable in the BIOS. And you can see, it can see both of these drives, which is a good sign. I'm just going to check the drives and I can see they have been encrypted with BitLocker and if they've been encrypted you need to decrypt your drive before closing to prevent any boot failures and that's exactly what I'm going to do here. So let's go ahead and I'm going to open up the start menu right here and from here we're going to type. BitLocker and we're just going to check and see manage BitLocker right here and you can see it's telling me that it's encrypting and we can already see that BitLocker waiting for activation so I need to make sure I turn all of this off because I don't want to be using any sort of BitLocker on this system while I'm cloning. You can either decrypt your drive which shouldn't take too long but I'm going to go into The actual Windows terminal right here by right clicking on the start button. I'm just going to quickly go back in here and you can see BitLocker encrypted on both of these drives. So it must have been a previous drive that had BitLocker on that drive. So I'm going to go ahead and remove that by formatting that drive as well at some point. So let me go back into the terminal window here with admin rights. Say yes to the user account control. And from here, you can... A couple of simple commands here. I'm going to clear the BitLocker autolock and turn that off by just pressing enter here. And then I can decrypt the drives with a couple of commands here. So I'm going to go ahead and put this in for the C drive as well. So let me go ahead and do that. You can see it's fully encrypted and we don't want that fully encrypted while we're cloning the drive. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. So let me quickly... Put this command in here, disable BitLocker, mount point C, that's the C drive, and we want to disable the BitLocker there. And that will start to decrypt. You can see decrypting in progress. It's starting to decrypt that drive. Now, I can format the secondary drive and remove the encryption that way because that was from another system. So let me go into there and quickly format that drive. Now, you can do this in command prompt as well. Using disk part or any other method that you want to do as well. Now, if we take a look at disk management one more time here, you'll see that is decrypting. And I just need to be patient and let that decrypt the drive fully. So it might not be finished yet. But let me go into disk management here. And you can see this is the drive that we want to. Format, which is the two terabyte drive. It's the top one, the D drive. So I can quite easily right click on this and click delete volume and format. I'm going to go ahead and format here and remove the BitLocker from this one right here. Now, again, this will delete the volume if you want to delete volume. And this will literally format the drive. We're going to go ahead and format. The warning is just telling me that it's going to remove any sort of BitLocker or encrypted content from that drive. So I'm going to go ahead and do all of this and then we need to restart the PC once that's all finished. I'm going to go ahead and do that right here one more time. And we can then start the cloning process. It's important to take precautions when doing this before cloning the drive, just to make sure we get a successful clone. And we try to minimize any sort of issues that we could run into. And the software I'm going to use for this is DiskCopy from ESUS. And that's the one I'm going to be using here. You can download it for free. It does give you a trial. But again, I'm going to be using my own key. That I've got here to use this software. Let me just quickly show you. I'm going to download this. I'll show you the pricing so you can see the pricing so you know. Now, there's quite a few different ways of going about doing this. There's many ways of cloning drives, but this is the way we're going to be doing it today. And as you can see, a monthly fee for this is £14.94, or you've got the lifetime license for £44. And what that does is it gives you the ability to do a lot of different things as well. And I'll show you that in this video. So let's go ahead and quickly. Open up the software. I've already activated it and I've put my key in that I purchased and I'm going to go ahead and say yes to the user account control. This will open up the software. Pretty sure you know how to install a bit of software. But let that just load up. It will take a bit of time to get all the information it needs. And we're looking at the source drive here. The source drive is going to be the drive that we've got installed with Windows on it. The target drive is going to be our new two terabyte drive. So I'm going to go ahead and select that. And it's going to clone the source to the target, that's what it's going to do. Now the options available here, let's go ahead and click next. And you can see right here we've got auto fit to disk, that's how I'm going to set mine up. And we've also got some other options available, but we're not concentrating on those for this video. Click continue. It's going to erase all the data on that secondary drive, which we've put in, which is our two terabyte Western Digital Black drive. Before it's cloned, it will erase all the data on it. And now what it's going to do is calculate how long this will take. And this does go up and down a little bit depending on the speed of the drive that you're cloning from. So we've got NVMe SSD drives here but I'll speed this up and it only took a couple of minutes to do the full clone. So let's go ahead and let that do its thing and now you can see that's completed. We can now I have an option here and I'm going to say shut down and I do it myself but it can automatically adjust the boot order to boot to your new drive if you want to. I'm going to close this off and do that myself because there is a couple of things that I want to do like remove the drive from the motherboard and put in the 2TB as my number one drive. And you can see here we've got some other tools that we can use like system mode, migrating operating systems, easy. We've got partition mode. Which does exactly that. It allows you to clone your partitions. You've got emergency disc here for USB, CD, DVD and create ISO files here as well. These are great if the system's not booting and you want to boot to that, you can do. And you've got network clone, which is basically target PC to use PXE boot. If you want to see any of this sort of stuff, let me know in the comments section down below and I'll be happy to make those videos for you. So basically what we're going to do here now is we are going to shut the PC down because we need to remove the initial 512 gigabyte drive and then put the two terabyte in its place. So I've turned it all off and I now need to remove the power from the motherboard here so we don't cause any issues. So let me just quickly pull that cable out the way and there we go. And we can now pull the power cable out. And what we're gonna do now is quickly remove the initial 512 gigabyte drive. And we can use this as storage if we wanted to, or we can just remove it completely and just leave that space for another larger drive if you want to add in more storage space. So let me go ahead and just quickly switch these over. I'm gonna put the Western Digital Black, which is our new two terabyte drive with all of our programs and data on it. I'm gonna copy that to the front M.2 slot. And now we need to screw this down and then I can put all this back together. And we can boot it up for the very first time. We shouldn't have to change the boot order in the BIOS because we've only got one drive in it. And this drive now should take priority boot order, which is number one, which means it will use that drive as its main primary booting drive. So let's go ahead and boot it up. You can see it's loading up perfectly fine. And there we go. We now have a brand new drive inside here. Rather than having 512 gigabytes of space, We should now have two terabytes or near as dammit. And you can see right here, we've got our new drive installed. And that's pretty much it. That's how you can do it, Victor. It's very simple and easy to do. Let's quickly check disk management here. So you can see, and again, you can see right here, it's utilized the whole drive as we told it to. And that's basically how you can do it, Victor. Very simple and easy to do. Now, if you're using a mini PC, or you're using a laptop or you're using a desktop PC and it's got two M.2 slots that support drives, then you can use this method. If you only have one drive, you'll have to use an enclosure. Subscribe for more quick tech tips like this one. My name is Ben Brian from brighttechcomputers.co.uk. Just wanna say a quick shout out to all my YouTube members. I really do appreciate the support. I'll catch you in the next video or I'll see you on the Discord server. Bye for now.