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GPD MicroPC: Replacing the SSD and Installing Windows

Jun 4, 2020

The GPD MicroPC comes with Windows 10 Pro, which is great - if you like using Windows. I have uses for a Windows PC, namely amateur radio software as used to program my DMR radio, but prefer to live in Linux-land. Either way, a downside to this device (as I purchased it) is the tiny 128GB SSD that Windows comes installed on. In order to dual boot it and feel comfortable in either OS, I really needed more capacity.

Create Windows 10 install media

Download and install the Windows 10 media creation tool. Use it to create a bootable USB drive with the Windows installer. Note: if you visit this link from a browser not detected as running on Windows it will redirect you to download a Windows 10 Disc Image (ISO file). Don’t do this; open the link from within Windows and use the tool.

Notes:

  • If you visit the download page from a browser not detected as running on Windows it will redirect you to download a Windows 10 Disc Image (ISO file); don’t do this. Open the link from within Windows and use the tool to create the install media.
  • Don’t download the Windows 10 installer ISO. This works well for every other install I’ve done, but didn’t play well with the MicroPC; when using the standard installer I was prompted to insert a disk with drivers – but this didn’t work out for me when I used a driver bundle from GPD’s site. (It’s totally possible that I grabbed the wrong bundle – they have many and they are not well labeled)
  • Don’t create a recovery drive if you want to modify the EFI partition; reinstalling via the recovery drive will work great if you’re just wanting to replace your SSD with a larger disk, but if you’re intending to repartition it you’re out of luck. The main windows partition will be automatically grown to fill disk space but recovery and EFI partitions will be as they were with the original install. If you’re just upgrading to a larger SSD recovery media is fine; if you’re doing more, use the media creation tool.

Back up necessary drivers

Obtain and run Double Driver to back up drivers currently in use. These can be added to the support folder of the win10 install media once it’s created.

Replace the SSD

The GPD MicroPC uses a M2 2242 SSD, so obtain one.

  1. Remove the five small Phillips-head screws at the bottom of the case. There is one screw at each corner and one centered at the front of the case, beneath the GPD logo. The fifth screw for my MicroPC was hidden under a quality control label.
  2. Split the case open. I found that starting at the corner with the LAN port and working my way toward the serial port was the easiest way to do this.
  3. Remove the factory SSD and install your shiny new one.
  4. Snap the case back together.

Format (skip if sticking to a Windows-only install)

  1. Boot up your live system of choice; your preferred OS probably has all of the tools you need to do this. I booted the NixOS installer.
  2. Create an EFI partition; Windows and your alternate OS of choice will share this. Windows will create a small partition of ~100MiB, I created a 512MiB partition to accommodate NixOS as well.
  3. Create a temporary placeholder partition to fill out space for windows. I gave Windows 100GiB.
  4. Create partitions as desired for your planned alternate-OS install; I created an 8GiB swap partition at the end of the disk and a second partition for the rest of my data with the remaining space.
  5. Remove the placeholder Windows partition; Windows will create what it needs during the install process.

Install Windows

Not much to say here; insert the install media that you’ve created and boot from it. If it doesn’t boot automatically, press F7 at startup and select your media as the boot device.

Note: your screen is going to be in portrait mode, so you’ll be twisting your neck. Maybe HDMI works at this point, but I didn’t test. If you stumble on this post (or I need to do this again in the future), give it a try (and let me know so that I can update this!)

Install third party drivers

Open double driver and reinstall drivers previously backed up.

Profit

That’s it. That’s the post. Now you can remove all of the extra junk included with Windows and install an alternate OS on the partitions that you left when formatting, if that’s your kind of thing.