[SOLVED] installing second ssd. Boot and system partitions are on separate drives. Not sure how to proceed

Jul 28, 2020
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I have just bought a 1TB SSD that I want to set up. I am a bit out of my depth in trying to set it up with what I have already going on my PC.

I tried to install the new SSD the other day into one of the 2 available sata 3.0 ports on my mobo that were taken up by my old 64gb SSD and a 1TB HDD. I moved the HDD to a Sata 2.0 port, but when I did this the PC would come up with an "an operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system. Press Ctrl alt del to restart." error upon booting, so I changed everything back to how it was before, not knowing what was happening.

After looking in disk management, it turns out that I have my system partition on the 1TB HDD and the old SSD is my boot drive.

drives in diskmgmt: View: https://imgur.com/a/i5LhBuG

Now I have to manually boot from the HDD every time otherwise it has the same error.

boot menu: View: https://imgur.com/a/O1x7NTO

The second one is the 1TB HDD and is the only one that works. However in BIOS I can only set the boot option to my old SSD.

bios boot option: View: https://imgur.com/a/Y714vka

What I don't get is why the boot menu option wants me to boot from the HDD when the SSD is the boot device.

Ideally I want to have my old 64gb SSD as my system AND boot drive, and connect my new SSD to the sata 3.0 port that my HDD was on and just use the old HDD as a storage device on the sata 2.0 port.

I have a KMS activated version of windows 10 so I don't know how it will work in terms of moving the system partition to the SSD from the HDD using cloning software.

Any advice on what to do? Thanks
 
Solution
Unfortunately, this is always a bit of a mess to deal with. It sounds like you had both drives in the PC when you installed Windows; this is generally what happens and one of the reasons it's recommended to install Windows with only the desired OS drive connected. There are ways around it, but the cleanest way is simply a full, fresh install, and getting it right the second time around. Assuming that this is your company's KMS server, you'll have to connect the PC to the network.

DSzymborski

Curmudgeon Pursuivant
Moderator
Unfortunately, this is always a bit of a mess to deal with. It sounds like you had both drives in the PC when you installed Windows; this is generally what happens and one of the reasons it's recommended to install Windows with only the desired OS drive connected. There are ways around it, but the cleanest way is simply a full, fresh install, and getting it right the second time around. Assuming that this is your company's KMS server, you'll have to connect the PC to the network.
 
Solution