So I have a new christmas laptop.

It has a 128gb M.2 PCIe SSD drive. And a 1tb "classic" hard drive.

I want to swap the 128gb drive for a 512gb drive.

What are my options, except for reinstalling everything...which might be a challenge in terms of the laptop being pre-installed with windows and not having the recovery partition on the new drive?

I thought I could get a USB caddy for the new drive, and use a cloning program to just copy everything across. That would be the easiest solution, except it looks like none of the caddies support PCIe type drives, only the SSD M.2 drives.

Can I clone the SSD drive contents to either the 1tb drive, or a USB hard drive, replace it with the 512gb version, and then boot from the clone copy to transfer it all back? Is there a better solution I'm just not seeing?

I've looked at the manufacturers own clone utility, annoyingly it only works on the assumption you have the drive to clone to already connected. As I only have the one m. 2 port, it doesn't work as it won't clone to a none sad drive.

Presumably if I go down the route of using something like acronis, I'll need to clone to a removable drive, install the new m. 2 drive, and do a clean windows install before being able to restore the clone image?

So I cloned the drive, as well as making a full drive backup. Created a USB recovery drive too.

Used the recovery drive to access acronis.  Everything seemed to run smoothly. However, once it finished and shut down, when I rebooted I first got a boot device inaccessible bsod, and then the laptop went into a boot loop, turning on, showing lenovo, and then restarting. Couldn't get into the bios by pressing f2 and it wouldn't boot off of the USB stick.

Put the old ssd in and it's working fine. Going to try the other recovery disk options.

I don't know if I have the wrong m.2 key type, looks like the original drive was a b+m and the one I bought is m only, though I think it should work... Unless would it cause issues if the origins drive was sata and the new drive pcie type?

if it's not getting past the bios then it has to be a hardware problem

if it was software it would at least get to the booting from/pick boot device/etc... screen

no idea about b+m vs m tho

Ok, here's an interesting update...

Tried doing a fresh install again. This time it actually worked. However when I rebooted, same problem with the loop.

This time though, I took the drive out, booted, powered off, put drive in, booted and checked the bios to see the drive was listed. Saved and exited...it worked again.

I'm wondering if my initial attempt at doing the clone restore did something to the drive boot record or something, and my attempts since then haven't updated/corrected the mistake.

Is there a way to completely reformat a drive and do a fresh install? Doing it from the windows installation media showed that the drive was empty, but acronis listed two small (<1gb) partitions in addition to the main empty one...

I've never known anything like that before! Hopefully they will swap it, I can't see why not.

Figured I should post what happened in the end.

After Ebuyer gave me an RMA number, I found that disabling UEFI boot, and enabling legacy mode, "fixed" the problem.

Think it came down to messing up the drive partition so that I converted the GPT to MBR or something. I'm not fussed about not using UEFI, so I'm happy now. Turns out though that there are a small number of people with the Lenovo Y700 and similar issues with these Samsung M.2 SSDs.