BIOS won't let me select SSD as boot drive

James Devenberg

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May 22, 2013
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I just got a Samsung 830 256 GB SSD ($75 new in box!) to add as a boot drive on my Asus G75VX (came with a 1 TB Seagate drive). I successfully cloned my current hard drive to the SSD. Windows 8 sees the SSD and all its content, my BIOS sees the SSD under the SATA options, but the BIOS will not let me select the SSD as a boot drive no matter what I try. I have tried disabling secure boot, I have tried just the SSD in the laptop, I have tried both drives in, I have tired swapping which drive bay the drives are in. I'm not in IDE or RAID mode (can't remember the name of the third option, but that's the one I'm in). I'm completely stuck.
 
it is most likely a BIOS setting, something like drive priority, then another setting to set the boot order (which drive to check first). Failing that I would change my SATA port on the drive. If that does not work for you I would unplug all my other drives and get the SSD working with a full boot loader, master boot record,...
 
when you look at the HDD in the Disk Manager how many partitions does the drive have and which partition shows as the System partition

some laptop manufacturers make the recovery partition the System partition

did you clone all partitions?

when you look at the SSD in the Disk Manager how many partitions does it show?
 

James Devenberg

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May 22, 2013
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I've tried both SATA ports and every BIOS setting I can think of. My laptop didn't come with Windows 8 DVDs so I'm not sure how to get it working on its own.


There are five partitions on the main hard drive. There is a 300 MB unnamed partition that is labeled as the EFI system partition. Three of the remaining are labeled as recovery partitions, and the last and largest is the primary partition. I did not clone all the partitions, just the primary. I have one partition on the SSD. Should I also clone over the EFI System partition?
 

James Devenberg

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May 22, 2013
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No, none of the recovery partitions say boot. I see now the primary partition on the HDD says Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary). The main partition on the SSD just says Healthy (Primary). I cloned over the EFI partion (that is the 300 MB partition) and now I can select the SSD in my BIOS and Windows will try to boot off of it but fails, saying the required file WINDOWS\system32\winload.efi is missing or contains errors. Error code: 0xc0000225



EaseUS Todo Backup Free 6.0. It had an option to optimize for SSD which I enabled.