Crucial MX500 no boot device after install

[bondoao1]

My daughter has a Dell Optiplex 990 that she is using for school. The mechanical hdd is painfully slow, so I bought her a Crucial MX500 SSD.

Using Crucial's cloning software, (as I have done on other PC's in my house) I cloned the HDD and then attempted to boot off of the SSD.

I have done this exact operation on 3 other PC's in my house with MX500's and never had a problem booting. 
I decided to wipe the SSD and re clone it using Minitool Partition Wizard and I have the same issue. 

Does anyone have any idea what I can try to get this to work? I hope to get her PC working with the SSD by Monday.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Archerr]

Just now, bondoao1 said:

My daughter has a Dell Optiplex 990 that she is using for school. The mechanical hdd is painfully slow, so I bought her a Crucial MX500 SSD.

Using Crucial's cloning software, (as I have done on other PC's in my house) I cloned the HDD and then attempted to boot off of the SSD.

I have done this exact operation on 3 other PC's in my house with MX500's and never had a problem booting. 
I decided to wipe the SSD and re clone it using Minitool Partition Wizard and I have the same issue. 

Does anyone have any idea what I can try to get this to work? I hope to get her PC working with the SSD by Monday.

 

Thanks in advance.

try downloading windows onto a usb and then installing it from there onto the ssd. I have a 500gb mx500 and that is what I had to do to get it to work.

[bondoao1]

17 hours ago, Archerr said:

try downloading windows onto a usb and then installing it from there onto the ssd. I have a 500gb mx500 and that is what I had to do to get it to work.

I'm still working on this but I think I found a number of issues. I will update later but I did have to reinstall windows for a separate issue. 

[bondoao1]

The PC is working now without issue after a long day of trouble shooting, fixing, finding out it wasn't fixed and breaking stuff out of frustration. LOL.

 

If anyone else has this issue, here is what I went through and I hope it will help someone else with a similar situation one day.

 

I found that the PC would not see the SSD unless I changed it from RAID to AHCI in BIOS, then it would see the SSD and try to boot but I was getting BSODs every try.

I found the source of the BSODs when I decided to put the OEM HDD back in and I tried to boot but it got another BSOD.

Apparently the OEM HDD has issues, and after numerous attempts, it would not boot, which explains why cloning it to the SSD no matter what software I tried, it would give a BSOD on boot.
I remember my daughter stopped using this PC because it was giving her BSODs intermittently, but a reboot would usually work, but she switched to an old laptop for school and this PC sat for quite some time now.

Moving on, I did a fresh Win10 install, but when it would restart during setup I would get the boot disk not found error.

I found that it kept switching back to RAID in the BIOS so I would have to switch it back to AHCI in order for it to be seen.

I then did another Win10 install with it in AHCI and once everything loaded ok, I checked the SSD's firmware which was already up to date.

I then went to Dell's website to install the drivers for this PC, and I found that the current BIOS was 4 iterations out of date. 

I had to install the 3 newer BIOS updates in order, and when that was done I thought I was done. 
I shut the PC down and switched off the power strip (standard procedure in my house for all PC's)

I went back a few hours later to transfer data I was able to pull off the OEM HDD and this time I got another BSOD.

I went into the BIOS and everything had been reset and it was back in RAID instead of AHCI which would explain the BSOD.

The big difference now, which was light at the end of the tunnel is that after all of the BIOS updates, I was no longer getting no boot disk errors while in RAID, but since Win10 was installed in AHCI, it had issues running in RAID.
At this point the easiest fix since I had not transferred data or done any setup to Win10 at this point, was to reinstall Win10 while it is now in RAID.

Once that was done, no more issues and everything was working great, or so I thought.

I shut the PC down again and came back about an hour later and there was an error during boot about the clock.

I opened BIOS once again and found that the clock had been reset.
That is when I realized that the CMOS battery must be dying or dead which is why every time I would shut the PC down before it would reset from AHCI to RAID.

I replaced the battery and now no more problems. I have powered it down and back up again 10 times now without any errors.