I bought my HP Elitedesk 800 G4 SFF i5 PC reconditioned a few years ago. I have added RAM and have added some storage with a 1TB SATA HDD I had knocking around and although I cannot upgrade to Windows 11, the machine still does what I need.
This was until recently.
The PC came with 256GB SSD serving as the main boot disk and despite transferring larger programs (Adobe Creative software suite and Android Studio being two major space hogs) to the HDD, the SSD is full. Any performance goes aout the window since the Virital Memory pagefile cannot do its thing.
Time for an SSD upgrade.
Which drive?
I got a Crucial 2TB P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD. Cute little thing. My G4 has a spare NVMe slot – the SSD it came with is plugged into SATA0. I guess you could go for a SATA one if you do not have the NVMe slot.
Crucial have some instructions for the cloning process on their website, and you can download a free version of Acronis True Image (for Crucial ) from Crucial too.
Cloning with the software is quick & easy – just follow through Crucial instructions/ video, but prior to follwoing Crucial instrcution consder doing the following because when I did the last step my computer did not magically just reboot with the new harddisk (like they promised ).
1. Create a USB recovery drive for Windows
You need a fairly large empty USB stick.
2. Make sure you have access to your Bitlocker Recovery Key from another device, like your phone (and it is for the correct Windows install!)
This assumes that you drive is encrypted with Bitlocker – mine was from the shop.
I needed this to get back onto my original BitLocker encrypted SSD when Crucial instructions did not work. Having this means you will be able to bott with your oroginal SSD as a fallback!
3. Reboot and go into the BIOS (Esc, F2 or F8 whie booting? Not 100% sure which) and turn off some of the boot security features
I am not sure if you really need to do this – I did. And you can always flick back on when all done.
4. Follow Crucial cloning instructions with Aronis True Image cloning software
The last step in Crucial’s instructions is to unplug your original boot dirve and reboot. The instrcutions confidantely tell you that Windows would automagically boot up using the new drive and you life will be change FOREVER
It did not boot Windows – It booted into (linux) grub and defied doing anything else. I am not sure whether this is my own doing – whether I had an errant linux parition on the origina. Maybe you got lucky and Windows booted with no issues? Ig you did – goto step 6.
I rolled back and replugged in original drive. Asuming it would just boot Windows off that: Same thing: grub, not windows. I panicked! But panic not! I have armed you to deal with all the shenanigans.
And you can always get back to original drive boot with the System Restore option on the front page of the BIOS menu – you will to re-enter your bitlocker key (if drive encrypted)….but you have that from step 2. Whoopee!
5. If you hit the grub issue I hit.
To be honest – this is probably why you are here on this webpage!
Try the System Restore in the BIOS menu with your new drive installed (and the old one unplugged) and your recovery USB plugged in. I cannot recall the exact sequence of what I but after a few fails I was presented with the options to ‘boot Windows 10’ and voila!
I think I went into boot options at seom point in the BIOS and there was a Windows Boot Loader option there (where there had previously only been ubuntu/linux on new drive).
6. Expand partition/volume
Assumeing all has gone well (if it has not – keep trying – I am farily if you follwoed the above steps you have all the stuuf and backups to get there or restore) you will find you new ‘c drive’ is still 250gB. You need to go into disk management (right click on Windows icon > Disk Management) right click on (c:) and extend volume using up all that loverly unallcoated space.
