[SOLVED] Working SSD with W7 not detected in AW ipcfl-sc rev a00 motherboard

[themaster408]

I currently use a 2010 computer when USB 3 was fairly new and no M2 hard drives were used. It has a 256 GB SSD with Windows 7 and uses DDR3 RAM.
A friend of mine had a 2017 AlienWare computer (uses DDR4 RAM) where something was messing up, he was pretty certain it was the power supply and gave me the computer. I turned on the computer and power supply sounded like it was gonna blow (also, fan didn't turn on). I replaced the power supply and the computer was able to boot to W10 using his m2 hard drive (that he forgot was in there).
I'll refer to the parts as either '2017' for 'this came from the AlienWare 2017 computer' or '2010' for my older PC, even though the SSD is newer than 2010.

I took out the m2 drive from 2017 and put in my 2010 SSD and gave me a pxe rom failure, media not found. I tried switching SATA cables in the 2017 in case one was bad and that also didn't work (note: I didn't think to take SATA cables from my 2010 and try them in the 2017)
Went into the bios and tried switching boot priority to use IDE, same failure.
I did some searching and thought maybe my SSD is IDE and I need to change to AHCI (which I'm not certain of since the 2017 bios did have an option to choose IDE as the boot mode)

On my 2010 computer I looked at the bios and saw IDE was the only choice, no AHCI (which I had never looked into until this issue). Tried changing windows registry DWORD to 3 (it was 0) in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci following a guide from winaero.com. I can boot just fine (this is my 2010). However, then tried going into bios and IDE Controller is all I see for my HDDs and if I changed 'IDE extended' to off, then the machine wouldn't boot. I can't remember the failure and not at home atm. It gave 1-3 options and one of them was repair.

Am I even on the right track? Can anyone help me figure out what's wrong? Only thing I can think of is either:
A: I need to make my SSD into AHCI to get detected
B: The 2017 is 'set' to look at M2 and ignore the SATA cables for some reason
C: The motherboard is looking for that specific M2 drive as a security thing
D: The 2 SATA cables I used just happened to both not work.
E: The power from my working 2010 power supply has at least 1 bad power cable that I just happened to choose (I use nearly all the power connectors, so it's at least possible, but highly doubt this)

My ultimate goal is to take my power supply and HDDs out of my 2010 and into the 2017 with the newer motherboard, DD4 RAM, and newer video card.

 

[themaster408]

Btw, my 2010 motherboard was MB-345-108 GIGABYTE AMD GA770T-USB3 AM3 DDR3 166
I purchased it from cyberpowerpc if that helps.

 

[Ketchup79]

Barring your other issues, Windows 7 does not know how to interpret that hardware, as you are coming from an old AMD system and this is a much newer Intel (I believe) system.

Does he want the drive back? If not, best option would be to do a clean install of Windows 10 on the M.2 drive, and swap files either across a network scare or getting an enclosure.

 

[themaster408]

First, thank you for your response.

The 2017 is Intel yes.
The M2 is already back with the friend and he wants to keep it (more specifically, it's my friend Will's brother "Bob". Bob owned the computer, gave it to Will, then Will gave it to me. Bob wanted the M2 back, so Will gave it to Bob already. I asked Bob if he could copy whatever he needed and then wipe it and I would buy it off him, but he declined.).
I already backup everything to my external HDD. Do a clean upgrade to W10 on my SSD and then assuming it works on my 2010 computer, switch to 2017 and you think it'll work?
I thought about maybe getting some test W10 install onto a flash drive and see if that works. Do you think the fact that it was on M2 has anything to do with it or just the W7 issue (assuming no cables are bad).

 

[Ketchup79]

So the computer does need to be in a state where it will recognize the your drive, but you should just be able to boot the Alienware off a fresh Windows 10 flash drive and load the OS on your hard drive from there.

Do you know how to get the latest copy of Windows 10 onto a hard drive?

As far as how to get the computer to recognize y our drive, that will be very dependent on your BIOS. If you continue to have issue, you may want to take some pics of BIOS pages specific to the boot options and post them here.