Problem trying to make a bootable W10 HD a secondary drive.

[tomm108]

I've got a new PC with and SSD and am trying to add a hard drive from a W10 laptop. Using the W10 boot recovery tools, with the SSD disconnected, I formatted the drive from the "cmd" prompt. When I reconnect both drives, the system ignores the SSD and complains about needing to recover the HD copy of W10. How can I get past this?

 

[popatim]

Disconnect the ssd again.
Boot using the bootdisk you made, bring up an admin level commend prompt, and run diskpart.
Select the disk and once it's selected enter the 'clean' command.
You can now exit.

Reconnect the ssd and boot up and you can re-partition the hdd from Disk management (run diskmgmt.msc) if you aren't prompted to when windows starts up.

 

[tomm108]

Yes, Diskpart seemed to be a key part of getting the drive recognized in Windows. However after posting the question I ran the SeaGate Boot Chest utilities and erased track zero. That allowed the SSD to boot with the HD connected. But the screen in diskmgr.msc didn't appear to provide a partition option. So after getting your response, I went back to the boot recovery disk. There I cleaned it as you said and formatted it as NTFS with a label. Windows in now happy with the HD. Thanks!

 

[popatim]

Nice work!