Gateway p173xl fx and my ssd problem

[Lonehelljumper]

I found this laptop in an old storage building I cleaned out, I bought it around 11 years ago and it is working but the harddrive is going bad. I decided on turning it into a fuel boot windows 10 / primarily linux machine. I bought 2 ssds for it as it holds 2. Problem is bios doesnt see the ssds, but windows does. I tried downloading a bios update but for the life of me cant figure out how to install it (the instructions don't make any sense). Please help. 

[Wander Away]

This doesn't sound right as if you can boot into windows then bios has to see the drives. 

One thing that you might want to check is if you can format those to a legacy MBR partition table, since GPT is suppposed to support the newer UEFI standard. 

[vanished]

What specifically isn't working?  You say they don't show up in the BIOS, but that in and of itself doesn't matter, it's only an issue if it's stopping you from doing something else.  Is it?   If they show up to Windows I would think that's all you need, right?   That implies that Windows starts, which is kind of a big deal itself in context, and that they're working and usable by the OS.

[Lonehelljumper]

4 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

What specifically isn't working?  You say they don't show up in the BIOS, but that in and of itself doesn't matter, it's only an issue if it's stopping you from doing something else.  Is it?   If they show up to Windows I would think that's all you need, right?   That implies that Windows starts, which is kind of a big deal itself in context, and that they're working and usable by the OS.

It wont boot from the ssds, I have to put the old hard drive in it too boot. From there i can access the cloned ssd. Bios doesnt see the ssds to boot, only the hard drive

[vanished]

Just now, Lonehelljumper said:

It wont boot from the ssds, I have to put the old hard drive in it too boot. From there i can access the cloned ssd. 

Ah ok that clears things up.  I would look into the tip above first - an old system like that might be unable to handle a newer format.

[Lonehelljumper]

9 minutes ago, Wander Away said:

This doesn't sound right as if you can boot into windows then bios has to see the drives. 

One thing that you might want to check is if you can format those to a legacy MBR partition table, since GPT is suppposed to support the newer UEFI standard. 

How would I do that?

[Lonehelljumper]

I have no clue what's going on here.

[vanished]

8 minutes ago, Lonehelljumper said:

How would I do that?

If you are comfortable with Linux, I know the gnome disk utility lets you do this.  I'm sure there's a way on Windows as well but I've honestly not come across it, and besides being able to use a bootable USB system is going to be easier for this anyway.

[Lonehelljumper]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

If you are comfortable with Linux, I know the gnome disk utility lets you do this.  I'm sure there's a way on Windows as well but I've honestly not come across it.

I've never used linux before, that's the whole reason I'm doing this. I want to try it out. 

[Lonehelljumper]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

If you are comfortable with Linux, I know the gnome disk utility lets you do this.  I'm sure there's a way on Windows as well but I've honestly not come across it, and besides being able to use a bootable USB system is going to be easier for this anyway.

I'm pretty sure if I could update bios on this thing it would work, but I cant figure out what to do with it. 

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19 minutes ago, Lonehelljumper said:

I've never used linux before, that's the whole reason I'm doing this. I want to try it out. 

Ah, ok.  Well, I think it's still our best bet anyway just because of the bootable thing like I mentioned.  If you have ubuntu or something like that already downloaded and "burned" to a USB drive, fire that up and run "sudo apt install gnome-disks" in the terminal and then we can go from there.  If you haven't done that yet, head over to ubuntu.com or the site of the distro of your choice and start by downloading the image.  Also download a program called Rufus from here: https://rufus.ie/

16 minutes ago, Lonehelljumper said:

I'm pretty sure if I could update bios on this thing it would work, but I cant figure out what to do with it. 

The BIOSes available should be listed on the manufacturer's website.  Most desktop BIOSes will find the file on a USB stick and work from that, but there may also be a software tool for Windows that handles this.  My older laptop works like that.  If that's the case, you may need to have a working install just to run that before moving on to using the SSDs fulltime.  You mentioned that the instructions didn't make sense - if you share them perhaps we can help decode what's going on.

Edited October 7, 2019 by Ryan_Vickers
adding detaill