New SSD not recognized--"Select Proper boot device"

[arkaeyn]

Hi all. I'm running three hard drives at the moment, and having a few issues getting the right one to boot.

HD1 is my original Windows 7 drive. It's old and declining, so I decided to get a new SSD.
HD2 is a newer larger drive. It is, as far as I can tell, essentially irrelevant to the issue. But it may not be, so know that it's there.
The third drive is the new SSD. (A Crucial MX100 512gb, in case you're wondering.)

When I installed the new SSD, Windows didn't recognize it. So I fiddled with the registry and switched the HD type in the BIOS to AHCI, and it worked. Since then I've managed to install Windows 7 on it and get it as the default drive when booting (although it still asks me if I want to boot to HD1.) The corruption on HD1 meant that I couldn't do a straight drive clone, but that's fine.

Today, I finally got all the data I wanted off HD1 and onto the SSD/HD2. In anticipation of HD1's eventual collapse, I disconnected it from my computer. And then I got the "Reboot and Select Proper boot device" error.

I went into the BIOS and checked things out, made sure it was booting from the SSD and not HD2, tried again. No luck.

Back into the BIOS, I noticed that the HD type had changed back into IDE instead of the AHCI. Since that was the issue with the SSD not being recognized, I thought I'd try to fix that. So I plugged HD1 back in, booted onto the SSD version of Windows, changed the "msahci" and "iastorV" values in the registry to 0, rebooted into the BIOS, changed to AHCI, all good.

Then I disconnected HD1 and tried again. No luck.

So my working theory at this point is that there's information on HD1 that tells Windows to recognize the SSD as AHCI, so that's why it needs to be in. But I have no ideas on how to change that.

(side note: a lot of advice I've seen for similar issues suggests the use of the Windows 7 disc to boot from. I can't find my disc, don't have a DVD writer, and a USB stick hasn't worked for that.)

The mobo is a ECS H67H2-M2 if that's useful.

 

[Darkbreeze]

The boot partition was probably on that drive. If you did not use the "custom" option when you installed windows, then it probably did not re-create the master boot record that was on the HD1. You need to disconnect all drives except the target boot drive, which in this case is the SSD. Boot from the windows installation media (Disk, USB, Recovery Partition) and choose the custom option. Delete all existing partitions on the drive until all space is unallocated.


Allocate ALL the available space (Or whatever amount you want for the drive. If you want the drive broken into multiple partitions you can, but I wouldn't) to a single partition and then select that partition to install to. Install, reboot to see that everything now boots properly and then reconnect your other drives.

 

[Darkbreeze]

By the way, if you have no installation media, how did you install?

 

[Paul NZ]

Reformat / install Windows on the ssd and change it to ahci in the bios before you do it

 

[Darkbreeze]

Reformat / install Windows on the ssd and change it to ahci in the bios before you do it

He said he did that, twice.

 

[arkaeyn]

The boot partition was probably on that drive. If you did not use the "custom" option when you installed windows, then it probably did not re-create the master boot record that was on the HD1. You need to disconnect all drives except the target boot drive, which in this case is the SSD. Boot from the windows installation media (Disk, USB, Recovery Partition) and choose the custom option. Delete all existing partitions on the drive until all space is unallocated.

I definitely did a custom installation, and would have said yes to any option to boot from that drive, as that was always the goal.

I downloaded a Windows 7 ISO and installed from the HD1 installation. I can install that onto a USB stick and try to reinstall onto the SSD, but I'd prefer not to have format it again if possible, so I'll save that for later.

Checking Disk Management, I see that there's still a System Reserved partition on HD1, 100 MBs, that doesn't seem to be on another drive.

 

[Darkbreeze]

That would likely be either the MBR or GPT, depending on the installation type that was originally done on that drive. Unless there is some reason for not doing so, I'd recommend deleting all partitions on that drive, and then if desired, recreate a new partition using the entire available space or however you'd like to allocate it so long as the boot partition does not remain.

You can then attempt to reboot to see if the result is still the same but it may still require a reinstall as the previous installation may not have created the boot partition if the installation was performed with an existing partition in place. It could go either way.