Parenting win!
Posted by
Mop (aka rburriel)
Apr 28 '21, 22:54
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My oldest daughter has a bitchin’ gaming PC but the hard drive is a small 250GB M.2. Last year I got her a 1GB external M.2 in an enclosure. But it didn’t work out. The thing would get very hot and she declared it unusable.
Earlier tonight the topic of lack of disk space came up again (I’m looking at you, Fallout ‘76!) So we considered turning the external drive into a bootable drive. I figured she could take it back and forth to her mom’s and always have her games with it. But the external enclosure remains unusable. So we looked up a YouTube video that handily demonstrated that it could be cracked open (sharp objects and spudgers required) and inside, sure enough, is an M.2 drive. And to keep it from rattling around, it’s cushioned with a bunch of foam pads. Gee, I wonder why it’s always getting too hot!!
So first we cloned her computer to the external drive (let me tell you, that’s never an easy task) then we tried to boot from the enclosure but it would fail to boot repeatedly. So we but the bullet and cracked open the enclosure as demonstrated in the video, removed the old M.2 drive from the computer and installed the new one recovered from the enclosure. She came running into my room breathlessly to tell me that her computer had booted successfully!
No idea why booting from USB wouldn’t work. It’s unfortunate that her motherboard didn’t have a 2nd M.2 slot so we could use both drives simultaneously. Frustrated that the external enclosure didn’t work out so she could just travel with her full setup in her pocket. But I’m delighted that she’s got 4x as much hard drive space now and it only took a few hours of trial-and-error (most of it spent trying to run drive cloning software, honestly).
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