migrating to larger SSD with GPT partitioning

My daily driver is Acer Aspire Switch 11, a convertible laptop with SSD on the tablet and 2.5" drive beneath the snap-on keyboard. Mine came configured with Lite-On 64 GB M.2 SSD (L8T-64L9G) and 500 GB hard drive. Soon I swapped the disk drive for 1 TB model from HGST (HTS 721010A9E630) when I got it for quite a good deal. But the SSD got to wait, I am a poor student.

 The laptop comes with Windows 8.1 (later upgraded to Windows 10) with UEFI configured which spells GPT partitioning.

Then the time for the SSD upgrade came, it wasn't that difficult. You just need the right tools for the job: replacement SSD, a bootable USB drive with Linux Mint 18 (Sarah, Ubuntu 16.04), USB 3.0 adapter for M.2 drive, and AOMEI Partition Assistant. The laptop would get a nice upgrade to 256GB SSD (Transcend TS256GMTS800)

• plug the new SSD to USB adapter
• boot the laptop to LinuxMint which you can create with rufus for UEFI booting
• dd the whole old SSD into the new one. 64 Mb block size is nice, I got 250 MB/s.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd bs=64M
• out with the old SSD, in with the new
• reboot into Windows 10
• install AOMEI Partition Assistant
• move and resize your partition

I tried several partition managers on Windows 10:

• EASEUS wasn't able to detect my not-so-matching partition table
• MiniTool wasn't able to move the partition (perhaps it wasn't recognizing the end of disk address properly just as EASEUS)
• lastly, AOMEI works just great with moving Windows recovery partition (located to the end of the disk) and resizing my system (C:) drive to its full size.

GPT table stays intact and the laptop boots just fine. I am a happy boy.