Install windows on additional drive through recovery

[p1pes]

Laptop didn't come with a SSD drive, just a 1tb disk.  Purchased an NVMe drive, installed and enabled + formatted through disk manager (now available as a drive in 'this pc').  Can't find any options to install windows 10 via the recovery software to a different disk?   I have created a recovery usb, but it just always tries to install to the slow 1tb disk...  Is there a way to achieve this without pulling out the 1tb disk (not great taking this laptop apart with the plastic clips...) - can't even seem to disable via bios.

Any help appreciated.

Cheers,

Tim.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@p1pes

Hello;

The HP recovery function does not allow you to choose the disk for the restoration.

Also, if the replaced drive is significantly smaller than the original drive, the restore will fail -- as the first thing the restoration function does is reformat the drive and attempt to recreate the original partitions.

If you want the OS on the SSD instead of the HDD, you will have to "migrate" it to the SSD and the easiest way to do that is to shrink the OS partition in Disk Management to make the set of partitions (without the Recovery partition) small enough to easily fit onto the SSD with room to spare.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-Hard-Drive drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

You should boot from the new drive without any problems.

Typical USB-to-Hard-Drive adapter:

Good Luck

[p1pes]

Cheers, might give it a go, sounds like it would work, shame the recovery doesn't allow drive change.

I'll prob just do a fresh windows install instead, and clear all other partitions if not able to use recovery.

Thanks for the help and to confirm that unable to use recovery, thought i was going crazy not seeing the option, ah well.