Notebook Hardware and Upgrade Questions

Hello. I recently purchased a Victus by HP 15.6 inch Gaming Laptop 15 (fb1000 [7Y8M8AV]) and have been trying to upgrade the SSD from 1TB M.2 SSD to a 2TB M.2 SSD that I had in my desktop computer.

For reference, the 2TB M.2 SSD that I am trying to install is a WD Blue 3D NAND 2TB Internal SSD - SATA III 6Gb/s M.2 2280 Solid State Drive - WDS200T2B0B I purchased from Newegg back in 11/2020. 

When I try to swap out the M.2 SSD that came with the laptop for the one from my desktop, it is not recognized or found by the Windows installer. I thought it might be an issue of needing the drivers for the M.2 SSD, so I copied the drivers for my laptop from the HP site and added them to the Windows Bootable USB along with the drivers I found being used by Windows 11 on the original M.2 SSD. Unfortunately, the drivers were not found.

I also tried to create a bootable USB using the HP Cloud Recovery Tool, but when I boot from the USB after installing the 2TB M.2 SSD, I get an "Error, No HDD" as soon as the HP recovery program starts and it shuts the computer down.  

I'm at a loss with how to proceed. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the drivers or maybe the M.2 SSD I'm trying to use is not compatible, or something else? I was having a hard time finding a list of compatible hardware for my device on the HP site to confirm this. 

I did check the Boot settings in the BIOS and found that Secure Boot is currently enabled, so I'm not sure if disabling that might fix my problems.

I've been working on this for a while and needed to step away and felt it best to ask the community for help. 🙂