[SOLVED] HDD showing in BIOS but not booting

[WM1257]

Hi,
I'm having a problem recently whilst trying to upgrade an old PC. I have taken the 1 TB HDD ot of a Lenovo G50-80 (worked before being taken out) and have attempted to use it in an old Packard Bell PC (with upgraded components). The HDD shows fine in BIOS, however attempting to boot into it shows a flashing underscore and nothing else. Booting onto a different older HDD, diskmgmt showed the Lenovo HDD as a RAW file system, so I attempted file recovery from it. A free recovery program found some pictures, documents and presentations of varying corruption level, however no files from folders such as Program Files or Windows were found. Booting onto the second HDD again today, the file type on the Lenovo G50-80 drive has changed to NTFS, however access is denied when I try to browse files. Diskmgmt shows the partitions as healthy. What steps should I take before attempting to format the drive and reinstall Windows? Would commands such as CHKDSK be useful or is there a risk of further breaking things? BIOS doesn't have any options for things like Secure Boot, so would it be possible and worth it to try and upgrade the BIOS? (I'm not super great at computers, so am stumped with this lol)
TIA

 

[BFG-9000]

If the drive came from a UEFI system it's partitioned as GPT... which is not bootable on an older system that requires MBR.

The solution is to blow away all of the partitions then format it in the machine you will be installing it in. Depending on how messed up it's got from tinkering with it, you may need a zero-fill utility to completely restore the drive to as-new factory configuration first. Such utilities are available for download from the drive's manufacturer

 

[WM1257]

If the drive came from a UEFI system it's partitioned as GPT... which is not bootable on an older system that requires MBR.

The solution is to blow away all of the partitions then format it in the machine you will be installing it in. Depending on how messed up it's got from tinkering with it, you may need a zero-fill utility to completely restore the drive to as-new factory configuration first. Such utilities are available for download from the drive's manufacturer

Thanks for this. I managed to use a free utility which converted the drive to MBR without data loss, and reinstalled Windows 10 onto it. Just need to remove a few redundant partitions that stayed, but other than that it works, with all the old data still intact.