PowerSpec Clone C: Drive Windows Activation?

czarship

Hello, I recently purchased a PowerSpec G436 and noticed the MSI Z490 Plus mainboard has another available m.2 slot. I was going to purchase a WD 1TB Black SSD when I noticed it's faster than the pre-installed WD 1TB Blue in the PowerSpec. Because of this, I'd like to move the operating system over to it.

Can I simply install the WD Black drive in the second m.2 slot, clone the entire WD Blue drive in the first m.2 slot to it, then swap their slots and wipe the WD Blue to be used as storage? If so, should I expect any issues with the Windows 10 Pro version that came pre-activated after cloning the OS drive?

Thanks!

JS_MC

Hello @czarship. Welcome to the community.

I'd recommend using cloning software to do this, but yes, you should be able to do just that.

The OS activation key is tied to the motherboard and should not have an issue with just one part change.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this.

czarship

Thanks for the quick response @Landennnn! Yes, I'll be using EaseUS Todo Backup to clone the entire drive, ensuring boot and recovery partitions are retained. Good to know about the activation, thanks very much!

czarship

For Posterity: Success!

I installed the new SSD in slot M2_2 and used EaseUS Todo Backup to clone the entire OS drive in slot M2_1.

Afterwards I swapped the drive's slots and booted it up but it the computer was still booting to the OS on the old SSD now in slot M2_2. (After the clone I placed a text file in the root directory of the OS partitions on each to help identify "Old-Drive.txt" vs "New-Drive.txt" just in case)

I pulled the old SSD in slot M2_2 and booted the computer with only the new SSD in slot M2_1. After successfully logging into the OS, I shut it down again to re-insert the old SSD into slot M2_2 again.

Afterwards the computer booted correctly to the OS on the new SSD in slot M2_1 and I was then able to use "diskpart" from the cmd to "clean" the old drive in M2_2 to reformat it to be used as a storage drive.

TL;DR: I needed to pull the old drive out and boot to the OS on the new drive at least once before putting the old drive back in to wipe it.

*Note: The 30-day trial version of EaseUS Todo Backup Home worked perfect for this. It even managed to clone all 300GB of my OS drive in about 7 minutes and all from within the Windows OS!

TS_JosephF

@czarship

I am happy to hear you were able to close the boot drive successfully and set up the 2nd SSD as well.

By the way, if you are ever concerned about losing your Windows Activation key you can always run this command in Powershell or Command Prompt to display that it:

wmic path SoftwareLicensingService get OA3xOriginalProductKey

Never a bad idea to write it down, just make sure you keep it somewhere safe.