Why do I have to do this???

[RunAway]

So I purchased the WD M.2 nvme 500GB SSD, then went into my computer settings and made a backup recovery image of my system, copied it to one of the internal hard drives already present but formatted as a simple drive for storage, made a bootable thumb drive with Windows media creation tool, shut down my computer and unplugged all the drives (including the drive that has my OS on it), installed the SSD and booted into the BIOS and sit the thumb drive as boot priority. The new SSD showed up and is enabled. Then I booted to the thumb drive and started the image recovery tool. It detected the location of the recovery image on the hhd and started the process of restoring it to the new SSD. It will not work. I know it's probably because I didn't use an external hard drive like all the other tutorials on the internet say to do. I'm sure someone a lot smarter than me can tell me why I have to use an external hard drive. I only like a few more minutes before I know if this time around it will work from my external drive..

 

[DavidG]

You don't. You seem to have made it more complicated the needed. I would have simply cloned the HDD to the SSD. All SSDs will come with free cloning software from the manufacturers website. As long as there is a enough free space on the new drive there won't be a problem. You don't need an external drive - I have done the clone using internal drives several times without a problem. WD have their own version of Acronis to do the clone here is a link

https://download.wdc.com/acronis/AcronisTrueImageWD_WIN.zip

 

[RunAway]

You don't. You seem to have made it more complicated the needed. I would have simply cloned the HDD to the SSD. All SSDs will come with free cloning software from the manufacturers website. As long as there is a enough free space on the new drive there won't be a problem. You don't need an external drive - I have done the clone using internal drives several times without a problem. WD have their own version of Acronis to do the clone here is a link

https://download.wdc.com/acronis/AcronisTrueImageWD_WIN.zip

I think you're right about over-complicating it. I've done it before like this but I think I used an external drive. Seemed simple enough to just make a backup imagine and install it. Thanks for the reply..