Replace the SSD and/or HDD with a 500 GB M.2 SSD

[Ethyrdude]

One more post to finalize.

I noticed after the clean install, I was missing some HP software so I contacted support who advised me that I had performed the install of windows incorrectly. The issue concerned the front centre LED and wasn't crucial but I decided as I had some time today I was going to fix whatever was wrong. I downloaded the factory restore kit from the cloud but this generated an error near the end of the install which proved to be stubborn.

As I still have the original SSD, I decided to make another attempt at cloning by downloading the Macrium Reflect free as suggested by Grzwacz earlier. This was going to be a bit tricky as I only have one M.2 drive so I cloned the original drive over to an old HP HDD. This worked so after making sure I could boot with the HDD, I took out my old SSD and put the new SSD back in, booted into the HDD and cloned the new SSD with the HDD. This also seemed to work so I shut the pc down and removed the HDD.

On booting, things went awry and my pc would not boot, instead I received a number of alarms and I shut the pc down. I reinstalled the HDD to try again and this time the windows repair screen came up. I ran that, the pc performed an automatic repair and factory reset. After the reinstall finished, I was able to remove the old HDD, install the Data HDD and boot into my original desktop. My programs are all gone as was the data on D drive from the attempted cloud factory reset but as all was backed up, almost all my data is back except for what I downloaded the other day which is still available.

This wasn't as trouble free as I had hoped but at least I was able to get things up and running again and other than a bit of a speed bump when combining the windows partition with the unallocated partition on the SSD I am back in business. As they say, if you never encounter a problem, you never learn anything, so today was full of learning.