Hello, first time asking a question but long time user of the site. Unsure if i'm in the right section, hopefully i am.
Here is the full story. I got a laptop gifted to me since the person was upgrading. The original state of the laptop was 2 5400 rpm HDD of 1 To each and it had windows 7 home on it. The person upgraded it to windows 10 and then payed someone to migrate the system on an SSD. So now the config is 1 SSD of 500gig and 1 5400 rpm 1to running windows 10. The system runs without a hitch.
I wanted to swap the 5400 to a 7200 rpm, so when i removed the 5400 and put in the 7200, the laptop said there was no bootable drives. Checked the cables and connections all was good. The Bios could see both hard drives but for some reason it wouldn't boot. After a ton of trial and errors, even trying the SSD by itself and it still didn't boot which baffled me. Then when i put the old 5400 in, it booted but windows said there was something wrong. When i checked the bios again, i noticed that the raid was active but i dunno if it became active after i reset the bios or not. I put it in AHCI and all started to work again. Mind you i had never touched the bios before it didn't want to boot so no idea if it was in raid or AHCI. When i check the disk manager, i cannot delete the volume on the 5400.
So my theory is that the laptop might have been in a raid when it had 2 5400 1to in it and when the system was migrated on a SSD, the guy didn't do his job properly and something of the RAID stayed active which prevents a swap. So now i'm left wondering how to proceed. Do i make a recovery disk and wipe both the SSD and the 5400 and then use the recovery disk to put it back on the SSD (btw i know not to format a SSD) or do a clean install. But the clean install i don't know if my windows key will still work since it's tied to the computer (its a Dell M18X r2).
Any help is appreciated, kinda at a loss here.
Here is the full story. I got a laptop gifted to me since the person was upgrading. The original state of the laptop was 2 5400 rpm HDD of 1 To each and it had windows 7 home on it. The person upgraded it to windows 10 and then payed someone to migrate the system on an SSD. So now the config is 1 SSD of 500gig and 1 5400 rpm 1to running windows 10. The system runs without a hitch.
I wanted to swap the 5400 to a 7200 rpm, so when i removed the 5400 and put in the 7200, the laptop said there was no bootable drives. Checked the cables and connections all was good. The Bios could see both hard drives but for some reason it wouldn't boot. After a ton of trial and errors, even trying the SSD by itself and it still didn't boot which baffled me. Then when i put the old 5400 in, it booted but windows said there was something wrong. When i checked the bios again, i noticed that the raid was active but i dunno if it became active after i reset the bios or not. I put it in AHCI and all started to work again. Mind you i had never touched the bios before it didn't want to boot so no idea if it was in raid or AHCI. When i check the disk manager, i cannot delete the volume on the 5400.
So my theory is that the laptop might have been in a raid when it had 2 5400 1to in it and when the system was migrated on a SSD, the guy didn't do his job properly and something of the RAID stayed active which prevents a swap. So now i'm left wondering how to proceed. Do i make a recovery disk and wipe both the SSD and the 5400 and then use the recovery disk to put it back on the SSD (btw i know not to format a SSD) or do a clean install. But the clean install i don't know if my windows key will still work since it's tied to the computer (its a Dell M18X r2).
Any help is appreciated, kinda at a loss here.