I upgraded a laptop’s M.2 SSD to a larger one, but the (Gigabyte) laptop only had one slot.

  1. In Windows 10, hold SHIFT when clicking shutdown to perform full shutdown rather than fast shutdown.
  2. Use a live USB of CloneZilla to make an image of the OS on a drive with enough space. The image is a file, so no need to format. I used a USB3 hard drive.
  3. Change M.2 drive to the new one.
  4. Boot CloneZilla again from its live USB stick and restore the file from the external drive into the new M.2 drive. Be sure to select the advanced option to allow to proportionately scale up partitions to new larger drive size.

At this point, Windows failed to boot due to a INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error and repair failed due to the drive being locked.
I followed the instructions at https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-update/how-does-one-unlock-a-drive-that-windows-81-is/7244a3ab-96c0-4759-ba4a-e88023f85a8c
These consisted of going to C:\Windows\System32\config and renaming the following files to something else (I added .old to their names):

  • DEFAULT
  • SAM
  • SECURITY
  • SOFTWARE
  • SYSTEM

Then navigated down a level into the RegBack folder (in previous location), and copied everything up a level i.e.

copy * ..

A few restarts later (and an error code 0xC0000001 along the way) the system managed to repair itself and eventually boot up from the new drive.

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