XPS 8930, partition resize advice

If you can boot to windows open Windows Disk Management to see a better visual of drives. Right click on the Windows Start button to get to it quickly. That allows resizing although you might not have any unallocated partitions to use. 

@Thewestfield I think this can be done with Macrium Reflect Free Edition, but instead of cloning the entire disk, you need to image your partitions separately. After the partitions are imaged into separate image files you need to restore them one at a time. When you get to the OS partition you need to restore it with the 'Layout' option to expand that partition. See the Macrium Reflect v8.0 User Guide starting on page 197 (Modifying restore destination partition properties). Then restore the remaining partitions. Obviously, when you expand the OS partition be sure to allow enough space for the remaining partitions. You can only expand a partition if there is unallocated space after the partition so that is why you need to restore the partition one at a time. 

In your partitions image, I am not sure what the Image partition is and why is it red. On my boot drive, I don't have an Image partition. 

You have to move the C: partition last, after all the other partitions are imaged on the new SSD. That's when you can resize C: partition to use all the extra space.

Macrium can only expand the size of the partition that's immediately ahead of the free space, which means it has to be the last one copied onto the SSD.

@Thewestfield One more thing, since your target SSD is a Samsung SSD you could have used Samsung Data Migration to clone your disk. It is a free download. I suggest you read about the limitations in the user guide (also a free download). Samsung Data Migration allows you to adjust the volume size on the target drive.

@RoHe While I agree with you about Samsung software and drivers (especially Samsung Magician and Samsung NVMe driver) doesn't like using RAID, I did use Samsung Data Migration a long time ago in RAID mode and it worked. My suggestion about reading the limitations in the user guide is that one of the limitations suggests that the software may not function properly if Samsung's NVMe driver is not installed and that driver requires the AHCI setting. 

As @Mary G  and @RoHe  posted:

If you need to resize a partition, you use Windows Disk Management .

However, the only truly supported Microsoft Windows way says that you can only resize the last partition on a disk (with "raw" or un-partitioned free space after it to the right). Now-days, only time I ever do that is for manually Over-Provisioning a computer's SSD (so it doesn't die and early death).

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@Thewestfield wrote:

 

Advice or pointers to other threads with tips appreciated.

 

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Clones are sketchy (don't you watch Sci-Fi ?) . Seriously though.

All those Dell partitions are pretty-much useless now that you have changed the size and geometry of the C-Drive (out from underneath them).

If you wanted all that, what you should have done is first created the Windows Recovery USB, install the new drive, and then used that USB to restore the machine.

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-Desktops/Aurora-R13-reinstall-Windows-11-from-scratch/m-p/8163910/highlight/true#M57260

I would recommend a Nuke-and-Pave and clean-install to a completely blank disk. Set BIOS options to UEFI/AHCI/SecureBoot. Windows will create one hidden recovery partition at front of drive. Then, one big C-Drive partition. Easy-peasy.

@Thewestfield  BTW: Samsung SSD software and drivers don't like using RAID. So did you re-configure Win 10 and BIOS to use AHCI, instead of RAID, on your XPS 8930? 

Dell shipped your PC with BIOS set to RAID, so you don't have the AHCI drivers installed, unless you already did the re-configuration. You must make that change the right way to get the AHCI drivers installed in Win 10 or the PC won't be bootable if you just go into BIOS and change it AHCI, so don't make that change, yet...

@Vic384  That 5th partition is probably shown with a red bar because it's very close to being full, 4.08 GB used out of 4.21 GB available for that partition. On my XPS 8930 that 5th partition is essentially the same size as the one in the image (above) and has a red bar too. It's labeled as "Recovery Partition".

EDIT: And we don't want to change the size of any partition (aside from C:) because that may make a recovery from Dell's OS image that's stored on the SSD to become inaccessible.

Thanks to all for replies - lots to consider. Just to confirm, the BIOS is set to AHCI but interestly it was like that when I got it, as I certainly don’t recall changing it. I have booted from the new disk, via F12 etc, and it all seems to work fine as it is.

However, I am currently booting from the original disk whilst I sort all this out. 

Thanks again. 

If you ever reset BIOS to its defaults, that would have changed SATA Mode back to AHCI.

Are the Samsung drivers and software installed?

So I went for the Samsung migration software route. Two of the partitions haven’t copied across but, the image & Dell Support ones, but the C partition has expanded to fill the rest of the drive and is the last partition on the right. Not sure if losing these 2 segments is an issue if it is working fine?

I’ve installed the driver and everything is working ok - benchmarking shows the kind of speeds I would expect. 

An unexpected issue is that after copying the old drive to the Samsung it no longer works.  If I boot from it I end up having to choose the keyboard language & end up at recovery. I was going to leave the disk in drive bay, disconnected, as a backup if required. 

So it would be good to resolve this if at all possible. 

Thoughts appreciated.

Thanks

@Thewestfield I am not 100% sure but I think that the reason booting from the old drive does not work is because the new drive (Samsung) is installed. If you want to check this theory you would have to go through the trouble of removing the M.2 SSD. Usually, F12 allows you to select the boot drive, but I am not sure what happens if one of those drives is an M.2. 

As far as the missing partitions are concerned, the limitations say Data Migration clones the OS volume and two more volumes and that the System Reserved Partition is cloned automatically. I am not sure if the System Reserved Partition counts as one of the other two volumes. The limitations also state that the OED partition is not cloned. 

@Vic384 After I had cloned the WD drive to the Samsung drive with Macrium Reflect I could boot to either drive using F12. After over-writing the Samsung drive using the Samsung data migration s/w I couldn’t.  Not sure if I can be be bothered to take out the nvme drive to test if the WD drive works without it installed tbh.

Think I will just go for a different beck up option.

If you don't use the F12 boot menu, and just boot "normally", Windows Boot Manager should boot PC from the old HDD, and totally ignore the NVME SSD, even though it's also a bootable drive.

That's why you have to boot from the new SSD via F12, as long as the old HDD is still connected and hasn't yet been initialized in Disk Management to remove the OS files. So what happens when you try to boot normally? Do you get an error message? 

I'm wondering if BIOS got reset to AHCI while you were installing the new SSD because the motherboard battery is weak/dead so the settings reverted to the defaults. If BIOS was actually set to RAID and Windows was installed on the HDD with RAID enabled, the PC won't boot from that drive now because you say BIOS is set to AHCI.  Just a wild guess...

@Thewestfield Like I said it was a theory, I understand your reluctance to remove the M.2 drive to test a theory. 

If after using the Samsung for a while you are confident that everything is working you could reinitialize the WD to use as a backup drive. You can use Macrium Reflect to image the partitions on your boot drive.