Windows 10: SSD and HDD boot sequence off

I have a peculiar problem. I have a dell Inspiron 3521 laptop. It was running windows 10 as primary OS and Ubuntu as secondary with grub as boot manager. I got frequent BSODs so thought may be the HDD was dying so removed the HDD and replaced it with an SSD and did a clean windows install. Boots fine . Then i reattached my old HDD to the CD Drive bay with an adapter. It did not got recognized initially for after few reboots it did. Now i could access the hdd files as well . So far so good.

I was looking at the boot options and curious to see if the old windows on HDD will boot.I did a temporary boot to the old HDD. It did boot to windows. However now when I switch on the laptop i am presented with the old Grub boot screen . Unless I am explicitly booting to the SSD , it boots back to the HDD. Earlier while on ssd the boot used to take 3-4 seconds. Now it is taking up to a 40 secs.


I want to go back to the situation where I only boot to SSD. I would prefer not to format the HDD as I need to take a back up and i don't have enough space in SSD for that and cant get a new HDD during lockdown.


Will i break something if I remove the HDD ?


Attached is my screenshot of disk management if that helps



:)

 

SSD & HDD Boot Up Sequence Wrong

On Update 1803 it completely trashed my setup.

I had windows 10 on my 500gb Crucial SSD and my original HDD was a storage drive.

When I went to update to 1803 I was then informed that I didn't have enough space on my SSD to perform and update.... which was strange since there was 170gb and trimmed down as well.

So I had to go back to putting it onto the original HDD what I didn't know was that I now had the SSD booting up to an option of Windows 10 on Volume 4 which was the 500gb HDD --- remember I didn't know this.

I then had to re-install everything onto this HDD office etc.. etc.. etc... backwards and forwards, round and round the mulberry bush etc.. etc.. etc.. and was quite tedious -eventually it fired up with all my accounts having been put back to what they should
be.

The SSD though when trying to fire up from this went into a blue screen of errors.. .saying it couldn't do it.

But, the HDD appeared to work okay so i went with this for a while.

After a few months without the speed of an SSD I thought I'd spend on a new 1tb SSD (also crucial) to fire up with plenty of room and eventually replace all my HDD's for SSD's ---- so after cloning the HDD 500gb original with update 1803 on it to the new
1tb SSD I put the 1tb SSD as the first drive to boot from the Bios....

Nothing worked but, when I went to the 500gb SSD it fired up - it was only when I was looking through disk management that I could see it was classed as the primary but when I put the 500gb HDD with the OS on it as first bootable disk, it went into an option
screen and I couldn't boot the OS it's only when the SSD was the first boot that it now somehow points to the volume with the OS on it ---- so, how do I make the new SSD the only one to fire up with the only OS on it ?

the Disk Mgmt screen display here is not showing the 1tb new SSD because I've taken the cable out for the time being as it isn't being pointed to by that other SSD....... what a pain this is I need help and instructions on this please.

The D is the SSD (Disk 0)

Disk 1 is the one containing the O.S. update 1803

Disk E is another HDD in the PC the others are just USB plugins.

regards,

W. Robinson

 

How to change boot from HDD to SSD?

Hello Alden,

I understand that you've already tried to change the boot order/sequence of your computer. To help you change the boot order/sequence to your SSD, refer to the steps below:

1. While your computer is booting up, press the F2/Del key to enter BIOS setup.

2. Change the boot order/sequence and set your cloned SSD as the 1st boot device.

3. Save the changes.

You may also check the answer from Andre Da Costa in this
thread
for a more detailed steps of changing the boot order/sequence of your computer.

Let me know if you have other concerns.

Regards.

 

How to change boot from HDD to SSD?

Hello,

Thank you for the advice, I followed your instruction, went to F2 in BIOS and changed sequence of bootable disks putting SDD on top of HDD, so it was on BIOS like this :1) Windows, 2) SSD Crucial; 3) Toshiba HDD ( original drive).

But results were pretty suprising: booting did not cut by 80% like some people say it will if boot will go from SSD instead of HDD. It looks to me booting from SSD is even longer than from HDD and I now wonder if cloning was done correctly, may be it something
wrong with partition?

I checked disk management and copied image from it. Disk 1 (SSD) shows Healthy (primary partition) and HDD shows Healthy (boot, page file, crash dump and primary partition). SSD is missing page file, crash dump) May be it's the reason why SSD boot is slow?
And if I will have to erase my cloned Windows from SSD is it possible to clone it again to the same SSD may be using different software?. I am afraid if I format SSD to re-clone my HDD, it will erase not just my Windows and some other apps on SSD but also
it will erase installation software that came with SSD. I will appreciate your advice.

AD