Windows 10: Seperate Windows installation on new m.2 SSD drive not bootable.

Hello everyone,


I've been struggling to find a solution to this for hours on end now so I'm hoping someone can help out

Just yesterday I upgraded to a new m.2 SSD and want to use it as my system drive.

So I loaded up a USB stick up with a Windows image with the help of the media creation tool and installed a fresh Windows version of windows on the new m.2.

The issue is that if I try to select it as the first boot option in bios it simply won't boot; "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"

If I choose my old "regular" SSD with the old version of Windows as the primary boot option it launches a dual boot menu where I can choose which version I want to run, both Windows installations work fine.

So after some Google-fu i've come to the conclusion that the new drive is missing the "WindowsBootManager", cool... I therefore boot into the command prompt via my recovery USB stick and attempt to create a bootsector on the m.2 by using "bcdboot c:\Windows /s h: /f EFI" or "bcdboot c:\Windows /s h: /f ALL" which at some point throws me the error "Failure when attempting to copy boot files."

A little research later the issue seems to be that the partition isn't marked as "Active" so I go into DISKPART, choose the appropriate disk and partition and try to mark it as "active", which spits out the error:


"The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk.

The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks."


So after yet another round of research i mostly understand the differences between GPT and MBR, but from what I can tell it's not possible to convert from GPT -> MBR through the Windows utility without formatting the entire disk which is what I'm desperately trying to avoid.

I've managed to grab a program which is supposedly able to do this without any data loss but on my "regular" SSD the option for the conversion is greyed out for my "regular" SSD and my new m.2, it's available for my third SSD and my harddrive though.

From what I gather that is because there are too many recovery partitions on the disks?


SO, before this post gets any longer and before I start deleting recovery partitions there are 5 on my "regular" SSD and since Microsoft support couldn't do much more than point me here I figured I'd plead for help.


In short - Is there any possible way to make my new m.2 "bootable" without having to format it?

All I want to do is make the m.2 my new main boot drive and format the old "regular" SSD afterwards.


I'd really appreciate any help!

:)

 

replacing C: with larger M.2 NVme drive and move programs installed on D: to the new M.2 drive

I have a DELL Desktop Computer XPS XPS8920-7581SLV-PUS Intel Core i7 7th Gen 7700 desktop running Windows 10 Pro with the Toshiba 250 GB M.2 NVme drive as the C: drive and a 1TB hard disk as the D: drive. I have installed a couple of games and applications to the D: drive due to the size of the install files.

I am now planning to replace the Toshiba 250 GB M.2 drive with a Samsung 500 GB 970 EVO M.2 NVme drive.

The procedure I plan to use is to:

• clone the Toshiba drive to a new Western Digital SSD installed in a hard disk bay
  
• replace the Toshiba with the Samsung
  
• clone the new SSD back to the Samsung
  

At that point I should have a bootable C: on the Samsung NVme drive.

The next step would be to move the games and applications from the 1TB hard disk to the Samsung NVme drive since I now have the space for them.

However it is not really possible to just move installed applications due to all the Registry changes that would be needed.

The two applications are Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 (both Community Edition) and the games are World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, and Fallout 4 (the last being a Steam download).

So I am looking for advice on these changes.

Alternative approaches

It seems that I have a couple of options:

• clone the 1TB hard disk to the new SSD and just use the new SSD as D:
  
• uninstall the games and applications then reinstall them to the new C:
  
• create a D: partition on the new NVme drive and copy the installation folders there
  

The easiest approach would seem to be to clone the 1TB drive to the new SSD as D: and move on. However I would be missing out on the NVme goodness with the games as well as the Visual Studio programming environment.

The most straightforward approach would be to uninstall the games and applications from the 1TB hard disk and then reinstall them to the C: drive.

The applications are Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017, both Community Edition. These would both be straightforward to uninstall from D: and reinstall to C:.

The games are World of Warcraft and Destiny 2 from Blizzard and Fallout 4 from Steam. These games will require long download time probably two or three days over my internet access. And I would have to start Fallout 4 all over again.

Concluding thoughts

Perhaps the best option would be to combine the first two options.

Since the Visual Studio uninstall and install would be fairly painless I could do that while leaving the games on the 1TB drive and then do the clone of the 1TB drive to the new SSD. Then at a later date I could move World of Warcraft and Destiny 2 over to the NVme drive.

I would think that working with Visual Studio would be easier and quicker from the NVme C: drive while the games would be quick and responsive enough if the game assets are on an SSD.

 

third sata drive not bootable ?

Exactly. On the where do you want to install Windows screen, it has the list of all 3 drives, but when I choose the new drive is when it says it cannot install because the drive is not a bootable drive. If I select one of the other drives with XP installed it doesn't give that message.

 

Fresh Install of Windows 10 on new M.2 SSD not being recognized in BIOS

Hello, I recently got a new M.2 SSD that I installed in my motherboard on my desktop PC. I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 10 through USB installation media, which appeared to go smoothly. When rebooting into the installation, Windows Boot Manager
loads and gives me two options to boot to, Volume 6 and Volume 4 (Volume 6 being Windows 10 on the new SSD, I assume Volume 4 being Windows 10 on the old drive, which I had not yet reformatted). Booting this way works fine, however if I shut down the PC, remove
the old drive, then boot back up, the BIOS does not recognize any connected hard drive as having a bootable OS. If I go into the boot menu it recognizes that the M.2 is there in the boot order, but doesn't recognize a Windows installation on it.

For reference, I did select the correct hard drive during Windows installation, and the M.2 is formatted in GPT. If I reconnect the old drive it works fine. However, my plan was to wipe the old drive to free up space, and use the new one as the primary OS,
which currently I can't do if I can't boot with it soley.

Any ideas?