SSD boot drive swap

[Jimolikachin]

Hello good people.

 

Hope all is well.

 

I recently acquired an SSD which I intend to use as my boot drive. I have cloned my C drive over successfully but when I try to select it as my bit drive in the bios it does not boot from it and cannot seem to format my C drive either.

 

Does anyone have idea where I am going wrong and how to fix my problem? Thank you in advance.

[AugOwnz]

Disconnect your HDD so that it only shows your SSD. Once you did that you need to select Windows Boot Manager on your SSD (not just the SSD itself).

[tarfeef101]

Hey there. 

First off, you posted in the wrong subforum (don't worry, you shouldn't get banned or anything. just a heads up if this gets moved). This would be more accurate: https://linustechtips.com/main/forum/38-storage-devices/

 

 

I think i'd need a little more information about your setup here. How did you clone the drive? What do you mean by "it cannot format my drive", because motherboards don't format drives. So I'm not sure what you meant.

In theory, if you cloned your old drive successfully, then all you'd need to do is set the "boot priority" to the SSD first in your BIOS, and it should just work. So what did you do to get to this point? Especially the cloning process, as that can be tricky and is likely the source of the issue. 


One thing I might also ask is if you can still boot from the hard drive, please do that and see if the files are the same on the SSD once you boot (it should still be viewable in your PC if you didn't boot from it, so that'd help us see how the clone went)

[tarfeef101]

1 minute ago, AugOwnz said:

Disconnect your HDD so that it only shows your SSD. Once you did that you need to select Windows Boot Manager on your SSD (not just the SSD itself).

Lol yeah should've mentioned that part. They don't need to disconnect the HDD if they set the priority correctly though (and I find it a pain to physically change the stuff more than taking the 10s to read the description of boot priority). 

But the windows boot manager thing I totally missed pointing out. Also you should enable windows 8/10 mode in your motherboard's boot settings if that setting is there.

[homeap5]

I want to ask about your config too. I had problem with boot drive selection on Asrock board when the same version of system was installed on two drives.

[AugOwnz]

4 minutes ago, tarfeef101 said:

Lol yeah should've mentioned that part. They don't need to disconnect the HDD if they set the priority correctly though (and I find it a pain to physically change the stuff more than taking the 10s to read the description of boot priority). 

But the windows boot manager thing I totally missed pointing out. Also you should enable windows 8/10 mode in your motherboard's boot settings if that setting is there.

TBH leaving more than the boot drive connected always got me issues when doing the first boot. It's just something to make your life easier.

[BobbyPdue]

Deleted

[BobbyPdue]

55 minutes ago, Jimolikachin said:

I recently acquired an SSD which I intend to use as my boot drive. I have cloned my C drive over successfully but when I try to select it as my bit drive in the bios it does not boot from it and cannot seem to format my C drive either.

I've read a HDD boot image is incompatible with an SSD.  Perhaps that's just a myth, but perhaps it's not.  

[Jimolikachin]

Hello. Thank you for your replies. I am running an Asus p8z77v-lx motherboard with i5 3570k and 8gb ram. I cloned from a WD green 1tb HDD to a crucial bx500 240gb SSD (I cleared enough off so the clone would work). I checked the drives after the clone and the does were exactly the same. When I went into bios chose the SSD as boot priority and disabled the HDD from booting the SSD did not work. I did know to use Windows boot manager. I'll look into this as soon as possible.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

3 hours ago, BobbyPdue said:

I've read a HDD boot image is incompatible with an SSD.  Perhaps that's just a myth, but perhaps it's not.  

It's true only if you are going from MBR to GPT and, possibly, from SATA to NVMe.

[homeap5]

As I said - one time I have that problem with SSD and HDD on Asrock board - I cannot boot from HDD until I disconnect SSD.

This may be related to drives identifiers in registry, so in fact your system starts boot from drive A and continues load everything from drive B. Try to boot from single drive and delete everything inside HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. Then reboot with single drive. Then hotplug second drive. And repeat whole procedure for second drive.