I do have a USB 3 to (2.5”) SATA drive adapter / cable which I’ve used successfully in the past to clone an OS to a SSD when I was short on internal cables or ports. (Clone from HDD to SSD, then swap the SSD into the HDD’s place.) And I do have a spare SSD. So, I’ve never done this, but I “should” be able to clone to the external SSD, and then clone from the external SSD to the M.2 SATA drive.
...Assuming there really is not a problem (that I cannot otherwise find) with the source eMMC, as Macrium seems to say.
If those security enhancements started happening 5 years ago, Macrium may be behind the times. OTOH, Macrium shows partitions Windows Disk Management does not. (One of those is one of the pair of small partitions that Macrium shows as cloning successfully, before the process blows up when it gets to “C”.)
Noted regarding the function keys to get into BIOS — it does appear they do not work with this N22. (Machine was mfg. in March of 2016.)
I’ll plow into the rest later: My wife’s vehicle just went “down” (appears an ignition coil may have failed), so, priorities... ;-)
Thanks for all the info.!
What you are dealing with is much more similar to the issues that I have with a Nextbook Flexx 10 convertible laptop/tablet from about the same time period. There are similarities with making a standalone Linux USB drive but it is not as useful of a comparison.
The BIOS on our Flexx 10 can only be described as bizarre... The BIOS/UEFI was designed to keep people from switching a machine that is very challenged running Windows 10 (especially after a few updates) to Android or Linux, but it also creates all sorts of difficulties and challenges when trying to do any type of upgrade. Despite its eccentricities my wife likes the old little POS so I have wasted a considerable amount of time trying to keep it going.
Your Lenovo is much more capable than the Flexx 10 but I can guarantee that you are going to have further challenges trying to complete your upgrade.
I doubt that Macrium is actually successfully cloning two small partitions with Macrium before it chokes on your “C” drive. You should probably try manually deleting whatever partitions have been cloned onto your 256 GB SDATA M.2 and then clone just your efi partition and then clone your “C” drive and forget about the other partition which is likely a recovery partition, a partition made by Windows sandbox or other virtual machine software, or just plain unused space that is being recognized incorrectly by Macrium. I am not buying what Macrium customer support is telling you other than you seem to be working with challenging hardware.
I have been looking over the Lenovo N22 support page to see if I could find anything helpful for you, but without the serial number I can't find anything specific to your machine.
You might also check out what others have experienced with the Lenovo N22 on various forums. I am sure that you are not the first to run into this difficulty trying to upgrade the SSD.
After experiencing this same type of thing on previous occasions... good luck... you are probably going to need it.