ME mini move windows to NVME?

genehilton

Hi I just received my ME mini (label photo below). So far it seems great. I was surprised that it came with some sort of Windows 11 installer on the eMMC, and appears to have a Windows 11 Home license.

I will likely ultimately install some sort of linux, but thought I would play around with Windows on this machine. I have two questions:

1) Is it possible to migrate the Windows install to an NVME drive?
2) There are lots of comments on this forum about upgrading to Windows 11 Pro. Is this possible with this machine?

Thanks!

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Beelink CS-George

genehilton

Hi there,

Yes, you can install the image on the NVME SSD on Slot 4.
Here is the image https://url.bee-link.cn/ZjDY

Here is the picture tutorial https://mega.nz/file/KjZHyIqB#0EEVnG_1fWYCq_qL7GUYFGuD7nKqlV8FZWu78SVGXS4
Here is the Video tutorial https://mega.nz/file/rjw3DLjB#oCO056vM5R3bB2f1n9Kqj9aTF7eHDqGsmVghNekhsP4

Tutorial on how to choose Windows pro or Windows home, how to select SSD as the system drive. https://url.bee-link.cn/IqkU

the1avi

Beelink CS-George I received via email two links to download the image file. One of them is the one provided here and another takes me to a MEGA web page to download the image. This one (I assume it is also a MEGA link) stops in the middle and does not resume. Last night I started the download from the MEGA web page and it stopped after 50% and asked me to pay or wait for 6 hours to continue the download. I went to sleep and woke up this morning and it was up to 51% and paused again. At this rate it will take weeks to complete the download.

Is there a non MEGA download for the image?

genehilton

That worked great! Win11 Pro tells me it needs an activation key. Can I get one? The label from my machine is below. Thanks!

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Beelink CS-George

genehilton Hi there, please check your private message.
Any questions, please do let us know.

the1avi

Where do I find the system files in the original eMMC installation?

zoophagous

Tech upgrades always spark excitement, especially when it comes to storage speed. Moving Windows from a SATA drive to an NVMe is one of those steps that feels like giving your PC a new life. I once had to clone an old laptop drive and ran into boot errors until I fixed BIOS settings. Sharing this moment is like Geometry Dash where one wrong move forces you to restart carefully.

the1avi

OK, I’ll try again. The instructions tell you to use a flash drive formatted to NTFS and named WINPE. It then tells me to copy the system files to the root directory of the flash drive.

What the instructions don’t tell me is where do I find the system files on my system. So where are they?

genehilton

the1avi
They are in that big OSs.rar archive file downloaded with the first link. The files you want are a few directories down. Be a bit careful though. For me, when I booted, the program started immediately reimaging my eMMc (good thing I had a backup). Before you boot with the usb key, go into the scripts subdirectory and edit config.ini to change autorun from 1 to 0. Then you can select nvme before it runs. If you really want to protect the eMMC install, there is an option deep in the bios to disable the eMMC.

Beelink CS-George

the1avi Here is the image https://url.bee-link.cn/ZjDY

Tutorial on how to choose Windows pro or Windows home： https://url.bee-link.cn/IqkU

the1avi

Beelink CS-George I managed to download the file at long last but not via the browser because it kept stopping because of timeouts. I ended up downloading the image using wget on Linux. Wget doesn’t give up because of timeouts it just retries. Took a long time but the download finished.

the1avi

Beelink CS-George The document shows two files in the root of the WINPE flash drive, bootmgr and bootmgr.efi but these two are missing from the image. Is this a problem? Where do I find these?

the1avi

Update: apparently they are not needed. I was able to boot from the flash drive without them.

One major problem I ran into is that as soon as I extracted the files from the rar archive Windows went ahead and promptly deleted the files in the Scripts directory, claiming that it detected a virus. Can you please verify that there isn’t a virus? I had no option but to create the whole flash drive on Linux, shut down Windows on the ME Mini, and then boot from the flash drive (F7) in order to install Windows 11 Pro into the nVMe drive.

Also the installation process is different from what is documented. After booting from the flash drive it went directly to the Windows Deployment Management System. After the first boot I found myself back using the eMMC so I went into the BIOS settings and made sure that the nVMe drive is the first in line. This time it booted directly using the nVMe.

Beelink CS-George

the1avi there is no problem. bootmgr and bootmgr.efi are not needed. The system file is false positive.
Here is the key xxxTVJXM

peterchanws

I download the image from https://url.bee-link.cn/ZjDY. In your tutorial on how to choose Windows pro or Windows home, it states "Double click the file Winpe in file <Scripts> folder. However, the folder is empty. Where can I find Winpe?

the1avi

peterchanws I had the same problem because Windows claims there is a virus and deletes these files. See my previous message with what I had to do.

peterchanws

Hi Support,

Here is my the label from my computer. Please email me an activation key for Win 11 Pro.
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Thanks

peterchanws

Is this key xxx-TVJXM for my machine SN: YN1506JF40766 to change to Win 11 Pro?

peterchanws

I used xxxTVJXM for my machine SN: YN1506JF40766 to change to Win 11 Pro and got invalid code.

Beelink CS-George

Hi there, the key is time sensitive , please use it in 5 days , or it will become invalid.

Before you use it, please make sure that your Windows 11 version is PRO.

I send you the key by private message