Question Help with booting with new ssd

Llamabro4

Prominent
Mar 15, 2019
9
0
510
Alright, so, I am new at building pcs and stuff so go easy on me. Recently, I have put together a new pc with a new Zotac 1080 GPU, added some new sticks of DDR3 Ram (I'm now at 12 gigs), a new 550W EVGA power supply, and I bought a new fresh off the market 256GB Samsung SSD. With that, I am using an old motherboard with an i5 2400 quad-core and I would also like to use my family's old 1T 2011, I believe, Windows 10, HDD. I now have put everything together only to find this thing at an extreme crawl, even worse than the Lenovo I am typing on right now. I have tried to check everything the best I can and I found that the Windows 10 on my HDD requires a now lost product key to activate. Because of this, some drivers are not installed and I can't reinstall them until I get windows again. I then decided that I was too try a clean install on my SSD, delete everything on my HDD, and use the HDD for storage. I have tried using a USB stick to install Windows 10 Pro onto the SSD but when I try to boot with it, BIOs doesn't show up, but a blinking white line does. When I switch back to the HDD, everything is ok. I have heard that downloading Windows off the USB with the HDD still plugged in is bad, for some reason, so I then tried the trick of unplugging it and using SATA 1 cable for the SSD. Obviously with no luck. I am super confused and don't have the knowledge to conquer this task. So I am here to ask someone out there if they could lend me a hand. Thanks, and sorry for so many words without a lot of info.
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
1050 is fine.
I feel that your slowness issue is being caused by the old win10 having all the wrong drivers for your system.
If you still have the pc that the drive came out of, put it back and boot up. Check activation again. and once its activated you can link the activation to your Microsoft account. When that is done, your activation is now no longer tied to that key and you can move that to your new pc and re-activate using your MS account.

You should download the Microsoft Creation tool , if you haven't been using that to make your win10 install media. Install Win10 to the SSD while the cables on the HDD are disconnected. This will prevent Win10 from using the HDD to boot from. Please note that any application will need to be re-installed. The new Win10 will not know anything about the programs that were previously installed in the old hdd. Games that use launcher apps, such as Steam, are the exception. You just need to reinstall the launcher App and the add the old library location to it.

Do you know which motherboard you have so we can check if you need any drivers that aren't already built into win10?
 

Llamabro4

Prominent
Mar 15, 2019
9
0
510
Alright so, the deal is that I kinda took apart the old pc completely and stupidly, (this includes the motherboard, ram, GPU, hdd of course, and the power supply). Luckily I didn't take out the CPU and cooler so I don't need thermal paste. I will try to find all the wires and put together an ungodly contraption to try to power the system on and get the key. Btw thanks for telling me that because others haven't been helpful.

With the mobo, I believe it is the standard dell optiplex 790 mobo I found for cheap. I couldn't find the exact name but I have the pdf, , and what I believe to basically be the same thing but a different size, .

I am sorry for all the trouble, I will try to get back to this when I have the old computer possibly running again. Thanks.
 

Llamabro4

Prominent
Mar 15, 2019
9
0
510
Alright so the old computer did not work and I do not think it will ever work again. Right now, all I want to do is to delete everything off the old hdd and use it for storage and download windows into the ssd and boot with that. Any ideas on how to do this? If possible, I do not care about the windows product key anymore and I just want to boot from the ssd.
 

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