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Replacing a failing drive with a bigger one, making an image on it, + more
1. I have to replace the C drive in my Dell XPS-8700, which a warning says is failing. It is a 238 GB SSD and is almost full, and I want to replace it with an SSD with much more capacity, like 1 or 2 TB. (That computer is turned off until I obtain a drive.) How can I know which drives on the Amazon, Samsung, Western Digital, etc. web sites are compatible? Would a SAMSUNG 870 QVO SATA III 2.5″ SSD 2TB (MZ-77Q2T0B) be compatible? The description says it works in laptops and desktops. It is 2.5″ wide. Can it replace a wider drive?
2. a. Can I make an image of C on the new higher-capacity drive in a way that leaves usable empty space on the new drive? Is there software that does that? b. Can I make the image by plugging the new drive in where the D drive (not SSD) used to be, to speed up the image transfer, and then replacing the failing C drive with the image drive?
3. The 2 TB internal D drive failed slowly a few years ago, and I was not able to copy all of the files to an external drive before it failed completely. Check disk seemingly deleted thousands of files and made the drive inaccessible. Now the drive does not show up in Explorer. Is there any way I can access the drive in order to repair it and and/or retrieve the uncopied files? I would be willing to buy forensic software and/or hardware to do it. -
5 Replies
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It still has Windows 7, and I will install Windows 10 on the new drive.
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1. Yes you can replace the internal M.2 SSD with the 2.5′ SATA SSD, you will need a SATA data cable and some screws, you can pickup a kit here.
Because you are not replacing it with another mSATA SSD which is what is in your computer currently you will have the ability to clone your operating system over to the new 2.5′ SATA SSD (MZ-77Q2T0B)
2. Yes, use Macrium Reflect and it’s clone feature, click here for a guide.
3. If it is recoverable at home you will not need to buy anything, otherwise your best bet is to ship the drive to a data recovery company. You can attempt using Test Disk to restore your damaged partition layout and hopefully recover you data if the disk is still spinning. Click here for a guide on restoring partition layout, click here for a guide on recovering files from NTFS filesystem.
You can see here in this YouTube video, a user is using both a 2.5 HDD/SSD and the mSATA SSD
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Thanks very much! Instead of a data cable, can I take out the old dead drive D and put the new drive temporarily where D was to clone C to it, and then take out the old C and put the clone drive where C was? That would save the cost of the new cable, and wouldn’t it speed up the transfer? I am worried that C will fail before the process finishes.
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Ken,
You could do that but it would then use your only available SATA cable as I believe you SSD is connected via a mSATA slot (older but similar to an M.2 slot)
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Thank you for that information. I am not familiar with mSATA and M.2 slots, so I guess I will use the cable if it compatible.
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