Yesterday I installed an ADATA SP600 M.2 SSD in my LapBook. Fitted ok. and worked fine.
The ADATA SSD, when registered on their site, gets you a license for Acronis HD to clone the existing eMMC drive to the new SSD. But for some reason it wouldn’t work. It needs to restart the LapBook but then instead of loading Acronis it simply loads Windows again and nothing happens. (Later I noticed that Acronis creates some sort of UEFI partition called Acronis Loader. It appears it doesn’t set the boot priority in the LapBook EFI partition to it, so it won’t start. If you manually tell the BIOS to boot from that partition, it might work.)
Also (this version of) Acronis cannot move or resize partitions. The eMMC has a recovery partition as the last partition, this partition needs to be moved to the end of the new 256Gb. disk and the free extra space on that disk needs to be allocated to the C: partion. So I looked further for free tools to do this.
I used Macrium Free (version 6, do not download the > 800 Mb. Windows PE, you don’t need it) to clone the disk which makes a one-to-one clone of the 3 partitions on the eMMC (UEFI, Windows, Recovery) to the new SSD. Thereafter I could format the remaining space as drive D: to see whether this worked.
In the LapBook BIOS (hold Esc when booting to enter the BIOS) I disabled booting from the eMMC (and disabled booting from the Acronis Loader, see above) and it worked; the LapBook boots fine from the new SSD.
I then used “Aomei partition assistant” (also free) to move the recovery partition to the end of the SSD and resized C: to add all extra space (first delete partion D: to be able to add it to C:). That software rebooted the LapBook fine to do its business outside of Windows. Rebooted twice and then booted Windows from the SSD. Worked great.
As long as you don’t confuse source and destination there is no risk; you can always enable boot from the eMMC and try again.
I now have a 238 Gb. C: drive which is really fast (around 300 Mb./s write, 450 Mb./s read).
And a bonus is that the LapBook now has a second working Windows installation on the eMMC. Whenever for some reason the machine won’t boot from the SSD (when Microsoft screws up Windows after an update for instance), I can enable to boot from eMMC to get to my data or copy the working partition from eMMC to the SSD to be able to boot again.
The good news is also that Windows on the SSD stays activated since the license is in the BIOS I guess.
On a sidenote; I ordered two LapBook 14.1’s from Gearbest. The first one had the OOBE experience but the second one came with Windows preloaded with an ADMIJN account pre-configured. Weird. But at least it came with a legal version of Windows.
The ADATA SSD, when registered on their site, gets you a license for Acronis HD to clone the existing eMMC drive to the new SSD. But for some reason it wouldn’t work. It needs to restart the LapBook but then instead of loading Acronis it simply loads Windows again and nothing happens. (Later I noticed that Acronis creates some sort of UEFI partition called Acronis Loader. It appears it doesn’t set the boot priority in the LapBook EFI partition to it, so it won’t start. If you manually tell the BIOS to boot from that partition, it might work.)
Also (this version of) Acronis cannot move or resize partitions. The eMMC has a recovery partition as the last partition, this partition needs to be moved to the end of the new 256Gb. disk and the free extra space on that disk needs to be allocated to the C: partion. So I looked further for free tools to do this.
I used Macrium Free (version 6, do not download the > 800 Mb. Windows PE, you don’t need it) to clone the disk which makes a one-to-one clone of the 3 partitions on the eMMC (UEFI, Windows, Recovery) to the new SSD. Thereafter I could format the remaining space as drive D: to see whether this worked.
In the LapBook BIOS (hold Esc when booting to enter the BIOS) I disabled booting from the eMMC (and disabled booting from the Acronis Loader, see above) and it worked; the LapBook boots fine from the new SSD.
I then used “Aomei partition assistant” (also free) to move the recovery partition to the end of the SSD and resized C: to add all extra space (first delete partion D: to be able to add it to C:). That software rebooted the LapBook fine to do its business outside of Windows. Rebooted twice and then booted Windows from the SSD. Worked great.
As long as you don’t confuse source and destination there is no risk; you can always enable boot from the eMMC and try again.
I now have a 238 Gb. C: drive which is really fast (around 300 Mb./s write, 450 Mb./s read).
And a bonus is that the LapBook now has a second working Windows installation on the eMMC. Whenever for some reason the machine won’t boot from the SSD (when Microsoft screws up Windows after an update for instance), I can enable to boot from eMMC to get to my data or copy the working partition from eMMC to the SSD to be able to boot again.
The good news is also that Windows on the SSD stays activated since the license is in the BIOS I guess.
On a sidenote; I ordered two LapBook 14.1’s from Gearbest. The first one had the OOBE experience but the second one came with Windows preloaded with an ADMIJN account pre-configured. Weird. But at least it came with a legal version of Windows.
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