It is all a bit strange the happenings with this laptop...
FWIW you can do a clone with macrium, but it is a couple of steps involved
1. using Macrium to make a backup system image to an ext hdd...
2 Create the Macrium rescue USB stick
3 Swap out the HDD for the SSD
4 Boot to Macrium rescue and restore the image to the SSD, when selecting partitions, just need to shrink the main partition to fit the ssd, and any subsequent partitions
clonezilla would probably work just as well, but haven't used that for a few years now
You can avoid all the MS Account stuff by leaving the internet disconnected during install
Hopefully your 1909 is a legit version, windows should detect the license and activate automatically, and then upgrade to the latest...  If it's a cracked version you can end up with problems
The other thing I would suggest is do all your USB building on a windows machine, preferably win 10.
FWIW you can do a clone with macrium, but it is a couple of steps involved
1. using Macrium to make a backup system image to an ext hdd...
2 Create the Macrium rescue USB stick
3 Swap out the HDD for the SSD
4 Boot to Macrium rescue and restore the image to the SSD, when selecting partitions, just need to shrink the main partition to fit the ssd, and any subsequent partitions
clonezilla would probably work just as well, but haven't used that for a few years now
You can avoid all the MS Account stuff by leaving the internet disconnected during install
Hopefully your 1909 is a legit version, windows should detect the license and activate automatically, and then upgrade to the latest...  If it's a cracked version you can end up with problems
The other thing I would suggest is do all your USB building on a windows machine, preferably win 10.
The world would be a perfect place, if it wasn't for the humans.
Electric Kiwi $50 credit | Sharesies | Buy Crypto | Surfshark VPN | Cloud Backup
Electric Kiwi $50 credit | Sharesies | Buy Crypto | Surfshark VPN | Cloud Backup