Some issues after SSD drive upgrade

xckjoo

Hi all,


Having one or two small issues after upgrading my laptop from a HDD to SSD drive and looking for some help. First one is minor. The laptop keeps initially booting to BIOS when I power on. I can just exit the BIOS screen and it boots as normal from there so not the biggest issue, but it is slightly annoying so does anyone have any idea how to go about fixing this?

The second is a little more annoying. While upgrading, I took out the original HDD (to prevent accidental overwrites, etc.), removed the DVD drive, installed the SSD in a caddy and put it into the DVD drive slot. This is now my primary drive with Win10 and has been working fine. I have the HDD in an external enclosure and been using this to access my existing files, but want to move it back inside the laptop since I have the spare space. Yesterday I finally got around to merging the partitions on the HDD and it was still working fine externally. But when I moved it back internally today, the drive doesn't show in Windows. No sign of it in the Disk Management tool either. Moved it back to the external enclosure and it appears again no problem. Anyone any ideas on what would be causing this? Connection seemed pretty tight, but if there's no other obvious reason, I'll check this again.


Thanks in advance!


Laptop: Asus N551J running Win10

ED E

Put the drive in, open bios and see if its detected.

For boot issues the same area of bios should have an option for the primary device.

did you clone or clean reinstall on the new ssd

xckjoo

ED E wrote: »

Put the drive in, open bios and see if its detected.

For boot issues the same area of bios should have an option for the primary device.

I think it's showing up in the BIOS alright. I've the drive back out in the external enclosure at the moment after making things worse for myself yesterday. I'm parking that for now.
Managed to mess up the boot manager yesterday and now can't boot directly into the OS at all. Had to create a Win10 USB image, boot into it, mount the primary windows partition from the SSD drive and then boot into it :pac:. Win10 boot repair tools failed to fix the issue and command line tries (from USB image) give me errors too. Trying a few things to fix it now, but I've fallen behind the times with all the UEFI boot stuff. I've attached a screengrab of my Disk Management tool. Do these partitions look right for a Win10 installation? Partition Style listed as GPT in disk properties.

Deleted User wrote: »

did you clone or clean reinstall on the new ssd

Clean install. Thought it would give me less issues

jhud

The Disk management looks fine.

Can you check to see if you have secure boot option in BIOS some windows installations need this to be on(enabled) to boot.

I would also recommend having the ssd in the normal hard drive bay and use old hard drive in dvd drive bay with adaptor. But I would recommend removing data off old drive and formatting it up and using it as a storage drive as if this is not the boot setup can mess up your setup if your not familure. I have done this on my wifes computer and all working ok in this setup.

xckjoo

jhud wrote: »

The Disk management looks fine.

Can you check to see if you have secure boot option in BIOS some windows installations need this to be on(enabled) to boot.

I would also recommend having the ssd in the normal hard drive bay and use old hard drive in dvd drive bay with adaptor. But I would recommend removing data off old drive and formatting it up and using it as a storage drive as if this is not the boot setup can mess up your setup if your not familure. I have done this on my wifes computer and all working ok in this setup.

I'll check the BIOS settings again this evening. I couldn't see anything obvious last time but the terms aren't well explained. Will probably switch the HDD and SSD at some stage soon too, but getting the HDD installed internally has dropped on my priority list for now

The boot to BIOS issue is slightly different to the one I'm dealing with now. I've managed to mess up something in the Windows Boot Management side of things and it's not letting me fix it using the standard approaches of the automatic tool or using bootrec from the command prompt. My partitions look fine from what I can tell, so not sure why it's giving me these issues. I've tried recreating the Win10 USB image in case it was something specific it. Will try it out again this evening.

HDD drive has no Windows files on it anymore. It was divided into system and storage partitions to begin with so I just deleted the system partitions and expanded the storage one to take up the whole drive.


Cheers for the advice. Really not sure why this is causing me so many issues

jhud

Put ssd in main drive bay and see also check for secure boot enable and report back.

xckjoo

Fixed the Windows boot manager issue...... somehow :pac:. One of the solutions I found online worked. Not sure if it was before I got back into Windows or after. Fixed the booting into the BIOS issue too. Found an "Enable CSM" option in the BIOS and turned it off. Laptop now seems to be booting as normal. Might try the drive switch next.

Smiler_Joe

This looks like a disk signature collision: if you cloned the HDD to the SSD, then both disks will have the same disk signature, in which case Windows won't mount one of the disks. You just need to change a few bytes on your HDD, Google "disk signature collision" for suggestions on how to do this.

xckjoo

Smiler_Joe wrote: »

This looks like a disk signature collision: if you cloned the HDD to the SSD, then both disks will have the same disk signature, in which case Windows won't mount one of the disks. You just need to change a few bytes on your HDD, Google "disk signature collision" for suggestions on how to do this.

Interesting. Never came across this concept before. Thanks for the suggestion.

Wasn't the issue here though. Had done a clean install on the SSD and changed the partition table of the HDD. It's working now. TBH I didn't do much beyond install it again and reboot a few times. First boot it didn't show up in Windows, rebooted to BIOS to see if it was showing up there (it was), and then when I booted to Windows again it was there. Dunno what the issue was but I'm happy now


Thanks for the help guys