17R4 has arrived. I've never cloned an OS drive, critique my steps.

Since i had a 250GB 960 EVO M.2 and 1tb 850 EVO 2.5", I ordered my 17R4 with the minimum 1 TB HDD. My goal is to appear as if the laptop shipped with the OS installed to the 960 EVO with the hidden/restore partitions in tact. Unfortunately my desktop doesn't have a 2280 slot, otherwise this would be easier. I intend to

1. Replace original drive with the 850 EVO
2. Install Win10 and Macrium
3. Power down and connect the 960 M.2
4. Boot laptop and initialize the 960 M.2 with MBR+NTFS once windows has loaded
5. connect the original HDD via SATA-USB cable
6. Launch Macrium and clone the original HDD to the 960
7. Power down, remove the 850 EVO and wipe it with my desktop
8. Reconnect 850 and power the 17R4 on as if it had shipped with both of the Samsung's installed.

If I'm doing something incorrect, feel free to tell me how wrong I am.

Edit: One question I did have, do I need to switch the SATA setting in the bios from RAID to AHCI?

 

What's wrong with just booting up to the 1TB drive and once everything is set up, clone to the 960 EVO?

Seems like you're doing a lot of steps in between for no real benefit. You're still cloning a drive and your steps have multiple clones in there...

 

If you want that factory fresh feeling you should prep a bootable USB with your clone utility of choice first using another computer. Macrium can do this and so can most other tools. Then on the target computer install both drives and perform the clone from the USB utility. If you're using Macrium you'll have to do a little math when cloning from a larger disk to a smaller one since its resize utility isn't fully automated.

Once you're done remove the old drive and boot and you'll even have the out of box experience! The old drive, hopefully having never been boot before, will be a backup of the machine as it came from the factory.

As a side note, I usually backup the factory installation to an image. The reason why I do this is that I've recently found out that the "factory image" from Dell's website was nothing more than naked Windows + drivers in a folder that need to be manually installed. This of course is desirable to some, but I clean install anyways but I like to know what my computer shipped with is safe and sound somewhere.

 

Use GPT partition instead of MBR, if you want the cloned drive to work straight off the bat. Steps you listed are good, go ahead.

 

I use Samsung Data Migration, super simple. Almost 1 button use. Has worked like a charm all times besides 1 where I messed up. I'll be cloning as well soon, will let ya know how it goes.

 

Interesting. I did ponder with that for a moment but didn't research because I thought GPT was only needed for drives over 2tb. MBR worked fine.

I tried Samsung's tool first, after I had installed win10 to the 850 EVO and connected the factory drive via usb. It would not give me the option to clone from the 7200rpm HDD, only the 850 EVO to the 950 EVO.

 

Quick question since what I am thinking of attempting is along the same lines, but on my AW13 R3 (just ordered a few days ago). I ended up ordering the one with 180gb sata III ssd since I had an unused 960 EVO at home. I have never done a migration before, only clean installs.

So as soon as I receive the unit, just pop in the new SSD into the second slot and then just run Macrium off of a USB flash drive and clone the Original SSD to the new one? Once completed remove the original, move the new one to the first ssd slot and boot up for that factory fresh feeling? Did I miss anything?