[Solved] Migrating to an M2 SSD

[ashman70]

Right now all my SSD ports are in use and I am booting off a 2.5' SSD. If I wanted to migrate to an M2, would it be as simple as:

1.Disconnecting one of my drives to free up a spot for my current SSD.
2.Install the M2
3.Use carbon copy cloner to clone my existing SSD to the new M2.
4.Change the boot order in the BIOS to boot off the M2.
5.Done?

 

[Jamesbond007]

Right now all my SSD ports are in use and I am booting off a 2.5' SSD. If I wanted to migrate to an M2, would it be as simple as:

1.Disconnecting one of my drives to free up a spot for my current SSD.
2.Install the M2
3.Use carbon copy cloner to clone my existing SSD to the new M2.
4.Change the boot order in the BIOS to boot off the M2.
5.Done?

"Right now all my SSD ports are in use"? I think you mean that the SATA ports are all in use?

Are you using the Gigabyte Z370-HD3 motherboard? What kind of M.2 SSD do you want to use, SATA or NVMe?

Assuming you are using the mentioned motherboard, the motherboard manual says that if you plan on installing a SATA M.2 SSD, then the SATA3 0 port will be disabled. If you plan on installing a NVMe M.2 SSD, then no SATA ports will be disabled and you can continue to use your other disks.

 

[ashman70]

Yes you are correct, I meant all my SATA ports. Yes I am using the Z370-HD3 and yes I want to use an NVMe drive.
Thanks. Do you agree with my assessment of using CCC to clone my existing SSD to the NVMe? Will that work so I can use the NVMe as my boot drive?

 

[Jamesbond007]

Yes you are correct, I meant all my SATA ports. Yes I am using the Z370-HD3 and yes I want to use an NVMe drive.
Thanks. Do you agree with my assessment of using CCC to clone my existing SSD to the NVMe? Will that work so I can use the NVMe as my boot drive?

Yes, of course. Cloning the drive is the best way of transferring the system from one drive to another drive. Assuming you are already running High Sierra, your future NVMe drive should be recognized and can be used in cloning software like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.

I have no idea whether the new drive will be directly bootable after the clone, though, as I have not used CCC for some time. I heard that the current version of CCC will be able to clone the EFI partition as well, so it may be possible to clone so that the new drive becomes bootable as well. Worst case, you will have to reinstall Clover on your new drive and copy the EFI folder in the EFI partition on your old boot drive to your new drive.

 

[ashman70]

CCC does not copy the EFI folder over natively, once I copied that over it was bootable and worked right away.