OT: Migrating Windows from SATA to NVMe

Totally off topic from what I normally blog, but thought it might be useful to some people.

I’ve just migrated my home PC from a SATA SSD to an NVMe drive, and had some fun as there were some things I didn’t know about when I started.
Mostly this was because I was going from an old style MBR partition table, to a GPT/EFI setup

1. Make sure your PC is capable of booting NVMe
   Mine wasn’t (although I had done some research on this before I started. Running an Asus P8Z77-V LK which doesn’t have an M.2 slot at all, led me to see whether it was possible to add a PCIe adapter. This *is* possible, however the BIOS doesn’t support NVMe boot out of the box, and a modified one is needed. See this forum post for more details
2. Purchase a PCIe NVMe adapter if you need one. I bought one of these very cheaply
3. Purchase an NVMe SSD. I bought a Samsung 970 Evo Plus as they have good performance and reputedly better legacy boot support. I’m not sure if that made a difference to the migration.
4. Create a Windows Recovery/Boot USB and a GParted Boot USB
5. Install the hardware, making sure the PCIe adapter is in a slot supporting x4 lanes
6. Make sure your PC is not in the middle of doing some updates. Mine was and this seemed to screw over the registry somehow, requiring a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth before a partial recovery point restore got things working again
7. Shut down the PC and boot from the GParted Boot USB
8. Create a GPT partition table on the new drive
9. Create a 100MB EFI partition and a 128MB MSFT partition at the start of the drive with FAT32. Mark the EFI partition as ‘Boot’
10. Clone the Windows partition from the SSD to the new drive
11. Power down the PC and disconnect the old SATA drive
12. Switch back on with the Windows Boot USB connected
13. Use this post to build the EFI boot configuration (I did a lot of this the hard way….)
14. Remove the USB and go into the BIOS and temporarily turn off Secure Boot, and configure the necessary setting for the PC to boot UEFI from the PCIe storage device
15. Boot up – it may fail and have to boot into safe mode once to sort out the boot device in windows
16. Once it is booting into windows successfully, go back into the BIOS and turn Secure Boot back on.