Toshiba HDD Replacement Issue

[landonw347]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a 1tb HDD. I also have a Dell Inspiron laptop with a 120gb SSD. Both of these have windows 10 installed on them. When I put the SSD into the Toshiba laptop, the BIOS recognizes it with the correct name, brand, and size. Although, when I boot into it, it gives me the error that no bootable disk was found. When I place the SSD back into the Dell laptop, it boots up just fine. What am I doing wrong?

 

[Jwpanz]

Windows doesn’t like moving between hardware like that. It works sometimes but if the hardware is too dissimilar then it will fail to boot.

 

[landonw347]

Thank you for the reply.

So am I required to reinstall windows on the SSD when it’s in the Toshiba laptop? Or is it possible to keep all of my files and use a windows recovery disk?

 

[mazboy]

Save yourself a lot of grief backup your data files and do a clean install of Win10 (use this for the latest version: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10) onto the SSD in the computer that you are actually going to use it in. Trust me on this.

 

[topheron]

Odds are you MIGHT be able to use a recovery disk, but you really, really shouldn't.

The SSD has a windows operating system on it that was installed (with all of the system drivers) for the Dell Inspiron.

It doesn't have all the system drivers needed to run on a Toshiba. Windows can do some things to figure out that it has new hardware, but you really need a fresh windows installation to make sure that the system drivers aren't trying to do things that the new hardware (the Toshiba laptop) cannot do.

This usually involves getting a Windows 10 OEM hard disk image downloaded onto a thumbdrive, and then going on Toshiba's webpage and downloading all the drivers for the Toshiba laptop one by one and saving them to a different thumbdrive.

You'll have to install the SSD in the Toshiba and then boot to bios and make sure that the SSD can be recognized. Some hardware in some laptops just won't recognize certain brands of SSD's at all. If the BIOS says it's there, then boot FROM THE THUMB DRIVE, and let windows completely overwrite the SSD and install itself. Then I usually install all of the drivers I downloaded from the Toshiba website one by one. Then I let windows update download everything it needs to. Then I reboot and let windows update download everything it needs to. Then I reboot and let windows update download everything it needs to. (No that's not a mistype... you will need to force windows updates until it says you cannot update anything else).

You may not be able to recognize the SSD at all in the BIOS. In that case, put the old hard drive back in, download the most recent bios for your laptop, Flash the bios, make sure that it is updated, then try installing the SSD again, boot to bios screen and see if the SSD is recognized. If it is, then change the boot order to boot from the USB flash drive, put in your windows installation thumbdrive and follow the instructions above to completely rewrite your SSD with a fresh install of windows.

This isn't hard, but there are a lot of steps to it. The good news is that once you've done it you'll be pretty good at repairing computers!