Trouble getting SSD to boot

[DezGalbie]

I have a little bit of an issue with my SSD that maybe someone more knowledgeable could help with?

When I built my computer I initially had it booting from the old mechanical hard drive from my last laptop which had Windows 10 installed on it. I then decided to upgrade to an SSD to be used as a boot drive. I wanted a fresh install of Windows so I didn't directly clone the old drive. I made the mistake of failing to disconnect the old hard drive before installing Windows on the new SSD. Having Googled the issue it seems that when you do this then the SSD often fails to work as the boot drive because Windows installs some essential files on the HDD instead of the SSD (or so I'm told anyway). So I'm now left in the position of needing both drives connected to my motherboard in order to be able to boot from the SSD. If I remove the old HDD then the system will not boot. The solution suggested elsewhere was just to start again and reinstall Windows on the SSD after ensuring that the HDD has been removed.

My question is - Could this instead be fixed by cloning a specific partition from the HDD to the SSD without having to start again from scratch? I assume that the missing boot file(s) needed would be in a specific partition of the old HDD so if this partition was cloned to the SSD (just the partition, not the whole drive) then would the SSD be able to boot without the HDD being connected? If not, why not? And if so, then how do I know which partition I need to clone?

Thanks.

[lttUser1234]

This is why you should always unplug all drives from the system except the intended boot disk when installing windows. I'm not sure if you can clone the partition to the SSD of the Windows protected files. You'd have to use a partition manager and then "bless" the partition in the registry probably.

[DezGalbie]

5 hours ago, lttUser1234 said:

This is why you should always unplug all drives from the system except the intended boot disk when installing windows. I'm not sure if you can clone the partition to the SSD of the Windows protected files. You'd have to use a partition manager and then "bless" the partition in the registry probably.

Yeah, as I said - that seems to be the mistake I made. It's the first time I've built a PC and the first time I've set up an SSD with an OS and none of the tutorials I watched or read mentioned that I needed to do that so it feels inevitable that it was going to go wrong. At least I've learned for next time if nothing else.

What do you mean by "blessing" the partition?

[lttUser1234]

4 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

What do you mean by "blessing" the partition?

That means once you copy the windows system partition to your SSD and reconfigure the partition table you need to point windows to use that instead of the hard disk. If may find it automatically I haven't read about doing this in a few years.