Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

2. After installing the new SSD, you will be able to see it in Disk Management (right-click the Start button on Windows 10 to find the Disk Management option) but it will not show up with a drive letter unless you first partition and format it. You don't actually need to do this if your intention is to clone your existing install onto it.

4. After cloning, I recommend that you visit the BIOS and disable your drive (there is a list of checkboxes where you can disable individual drives) to make sure that there is zero chance that Windows tries to mount it during the first boot with the new drive. (I've seen some odd behavior in the past when both the old and new drives are present during the first boot.) After you boot successfully with the new drive for the first time, you can go enable it again and then format it.

 

thanks so i go into bios disable the old drive AND at the same time change boot drive to the new cloned one?

the way i have outlined it in the steps above is this the easiest way or is there any easier?

 

Yes, disable and change boot drive at the same time. As for your steps, that sounds fine, there's not really any way you could do it differently.

[Edit] One other thing I remembered. If your new drive is NVMe and you have the system running in AHCI (not RAID) mode, make sure that you install the Samsung NVMe driver from their site after the cloning is done. This model can periodically BSOD with the Microsoft NVMe driver.

 

you mean after the whole thing is done and the new drive is running the os? thanks for your help

 

You can either wait until then, or do it a little earlier, after you install the new drive but before you clone onto it — I think you will need the Samsung SSD present before you can install the driver.

 

just some further clarification needed please

currently in bios under boot sequence i have 'windows boot manager' and 'my current drive with the os' . when i install the new ssd it will show up here and i tick the box to enable it? i untick my current drive but do i keep 'windows boot manager ' ticked or do i untick it?

and under 'drives' in the bios i have 3 drives: 'sata 0' ; 'sata 1' ; 'm2 pcie.ssd' . to disable my current drive which do i untick 'sata 0' or 'sata 1' ? ( and while we are on that point i thought 5510 only had 2 drives?)

thanks

 

UEFI works a bit differently, you are able to choose a specific boot launcher and it might not show up as attached to a particular drive. Here is how I envision this working after the clone is done.

1. Disable your current drive. I suspect that it is SATA 0 but you can check easily... Disable one, reboot, and go into the BIOS again, and check the very first status page that shows the list of all of the hardware installed; if you disabled the correct drive then it will be missing from the list.
2. After you disable the old drive, back in BIOS setup, delete all existing boot entries from the list. Then reboot (new drive is still the only active one) and it should automatically discover the boot loader and add a new "Windows boot manager" to the list.
3. Once Windows boots up happy you can go re-enable your old drive and format it.

 

ok thanks

so do we know what 'sata 1' is?

 

The M.2 drive can be either NVMe or SATA. If you install a SATA drive there, it will use the SATA 1 slot.

 

installed the ssd just wanted to ask in bios the old original ssd still shows up in bios as boot option (even after deleting the entry it seems to get repopulated whenever i enter bios). this is after formatting the drive.

my disk management looks this after formatting drive d/disk 0 (the old/original ssd). and disk 1 is the new ssd drive c

1) should the old drive still be showing up as boot option in bios and can anything be done to completely and permantly removeit as an boot option?

2) drive d after format shows as having 464gb free of 465gb, while it is a 512gb drive after the format shouldnt it give 512gb as free/available?