BIOS does not have option to select specific hard drive to boot from

[toz35m]

Win 10 64bit

HP H8-1420t

BIOS ver: AMI 8.21

I need to change which hard drive my system boots from.  In the BIOS there is no option to select from a list of hard drives to be the boot drive.  Here is what I did.

1. Installed a 1TB SSD

2. Cloned the existing 1TB HDD to the new SSD using EaseUS ToDo Backup

2a. One issue I noticed is that it did not clone the recovery Image or the Window RE tools.  Not sure if I messed up when I cloned it.

 It is like this BIOS is dumbed down from what I have seen in the past. 

[Grzwacz · Accepted solution]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

HP provides limited BIOS options to limit support contacts; very wise, don't you think?

You should be able to tap "ESC" at boot. Then select the "Boot Menu" from the "Startup Menu". Now select the UEFI SSD.

A disk clone should copy all partitions from the source disk to the target disk.

Not having those partitions on the SSD is going to cause problems down the road.

I would redo the cloning operation and verify you move all disk partitions to the new SSD. Maybe try different cloning software. I have been using Macrium Reflect Free for years with great success.

Disconnect the HDD (no hot swapping here, shut down your PC before changing SATA data connections), connect the SSD to the SATA port occupied by the HDD. The PC should boot to the SSD.

Regards

[toz35m]

Thank you very much. This took way to long to get to this point thanks to HP for lack of a fully functional BIOS.

This worked to solve my issue.  I liked Macrium Reflect much better than what i was using.

What I did after cloing was swapped the sata cables on the two drives but it still booted from the old drive.  So then I disconnected the old drive and it then booted from the SSD. SUCCESS!!! 

I do not need the old drive for back up capacity at this point but I will need to figure out how to delete its contents so I can use it as a back up drive at some point in the future.

[Grzwacz]

Hi Toz35m,

You're very welcome.

Macrium is very good and free!

REgards