Windows 10: Forcing a boot drive to boot

I recently had problems with my DELL Alienware Aurora R7. Running Windows 10 Pro.I took it to the local computer shop It is a good shop owned by a friend of my son. They found that the M.2 SSD had given up. They got it all working again with a new SSD but used a new install of Windows 11 Home.When I got the computer home again I tried to recover my old ,Windows 10, system by booting from a Macrium Reflect 8 recovery USB and overwriting my new SSD with a clone of my old SSD. Reflect would NOT recover the system as it claimed that the new SSD was too small. Both SSDs are nominally 500GB but th

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Forcing a boot drive to boot

I recently had problems with my DELL Alienware Aurora R7. Running Windows 10 Pro.

I took it to the local computer shop (It is a good shop owned by a friend of my son). They found that the M.2 SSD had given up. They got it all working again with a new SSD but used a new install of Windows 11 Home.

When I got the computer home again I tried to recover my old ,Windows 10, system by booting from a Macrium Reflect 8 recovery USB and overwriting my new SSD with a clone of my old SSD. Reflect would NOT recover the system as it claimed that the new SSD was too small. Both SSDs are nominally 500GB but the new drive appears to be a few bytes smaller than the old one.

I recovered my old system to the internal Hard drive and was then able to boot my old system from the hard disk. Using Diskpart I cleaned off Windows 11 from the SSD and then used Macrium reflect to clone the system on the hard drive to the SSD. This seemed to work.

I then tried to reboot from the system from the SSD by pressing F12 to allow the selection of boot drive. Both the Hard disk and SSD appeared in the bootable list but both Showed as Boot Manager.

Selecting 'Boot Manager (SSD)' results in the system booting from the HARD DISK again.

Going into the BIOS to select the boot order only offers Boot Manager as an option and not the individual drives.

How do I Force the system to try to boot from the SSD.

 

Can't boot from DVD drive

Is your controller in RAID/AHCI modes? If so, the DVD drive will be listed as a separate device in the list of available boot devices, not as "CDROM". Remember that when setting boot device priority. Otherwise, read the manual to see which hotkey during POST brings up the boot menu that lets you select which device to boot from. Even here, the drive will be listed separately, and not as "CDROM".

 

Windows 7 booting off wrong drive?!?!?

Please move if this is in the wrong place.

I have two hard drives, a 1.5TB drive, and a 160GB drive. Windows is installed on the 1.5TB drive, as are all my files and programs. The 160GB drive has a bunch of old files, and apparently the bootmgr and boot folder. Nothing else is on the 160GB drive, other than media files etc.

If I remove the 160GB drive from the machine, windows refuses to boot, plug it back in, it works fine. The setup with two hard drives I have now is temporary, as the 160GB drive will go into another machine.

My question is, can someone give me a step by step on how to make windows force to boot off the 1.5TB drive, ignoring the 160GB drive in the boot process completely?
I don't know how to do this in Windows 7, on XP I would just run the /fixmbr command and its related ones.

Any help would be appreciated.

Note: I would really really rather not have to wipe and reinstall, I know it can be done without one as I've had this issue with XP before.