Coscto Desktop, want to boot off a newly purchased sdd

[Roykris08]

I bought my HP Desktop from Costco probably 5 years ago.  I just recently purchased a new SDD.  I'm afraid to format the old hard drive, because currently if I disconnect it, the computer won't boot from the SDD.  Any thoughts?

[Grzwacz]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

Please remove your product's serial number.

It would be good to know the new SSD product ID, what did you buy?

Is the SSD detected in the BIOS when you connect power and data cables to the new SSD?

Did you clone or copy the current HDD operating system to the new SSD?

Your PC can't boot to blank media. Do you get a "no boot disk error" when you only have the SSD installed in the chassis?

Regards

[Roykris08]

I think I found the answer.  I setup/installed the SDD/windows 10 like I was using any PC, but discovered that I have to go through "HP Recovery Manger".  Need to purchse a bigger USB Stick to do this.  Will report back on the results.

Thanks for your help.

[Grzwacz]

Hi Roykris08,

You're very welcome.

Let the forum know how it goes.

Regards

[Roykris08]

UGH;

HP Recovery Manager is not working for me.

Do I need to reset my HP desktop to Factory Settings before I can do the Recovery Manager?

If I do, and install it onto my new SSD drive....do I lose Windows 10...because my factory settings would take it back to windows 7.

And if it does revert back to windows 7 and thats what gets installed onto my new ssd drive, am I able to upgrade to windows 10 for free or will i have to pay for the upgrade.

That being said, I saw some other forums and it says you can purchase a recovery manager disk...can i get one that will install windows 10?

[Grzwacz]

Hi Roykris08,

You don't have to use HP Recovery media or the HP Recovery Manager to install Windows 10 on the new SSD. This is true if you have installed and activated Windows 10 on this PC prior to upgrading to a new SSD.

You can get Windows 10 installation media at the following (Link). Download and run the Windows 10 (W10) Installation Media Tool.

There are a couple of unknown variables in your situation: I don't know your HP Product number so I don't know how your PC is going to handle the latest version of Windows 10 (version 1809). I also don't know if you can buy HP Recovery media for your PC if you have to go back to Windows 7.

Install Windows 10 Clean.

Create DVD or USB W10 installation media.

Boot to the media.

Do a custom installation.

Select you don't have a product key.

W10 will activate post installation with an active network connection.

Copy or clone W10 to the new SSD.

The easiest way to get W10 running on the new SSD is as follows.

You can copy the existing Windows 10 installation on your current HDD to the new SSD using Macrium Reflect free (Link) if the existing Windows' install is stable and the HDD is working correctly. (Link) to instructions.

Purchase W7 Recovery media.

You need a product number to check for HP W7 Recovery media.

You may be able to buy Windows 7 HP Recovery media from HP or this media may be found at Computer Surgeons (Link).

Regards

[Roykris08]

Installing Windows  10 Clean

- I did this already, but it only half works

- If I try to boot from just the SDD (HDD is disconnected) then the PC won't work, get an error message like "no boot sectors/files"

Purchse W7 Recovery Media

- Is it possible to buy a W10 recovery Media?

Unknown variables

- I currently run windows 10 on my PC

- My PC is older, it originally came with W7, which got upgraded to W8 then to W10

[Grzwacz]

Hi,

Are you connecting the SSD to the SATA port previously occupied by the HDD? The SSD should boot to Windows 10 if you can install W10 clean on the SSD.

The free W10 download media is Windows 10 installation and Windows 10 recovery media.

I have copied/cloned many W10 installations from HDDs to SSDs using Macrium Reflect with zero problems.

I don't know what is causing your issue.

Maybe you should go back to Windows 7.

Regards

[Roykris08]

Yes;

I get the  "no boot disk error" when I only have the SSD installed in the chassis?

but it does boot up if I have both SSD and HDD installed.

[Grzwacz]

Hi RoyKris08,

I am out of ideas. I don't know what is going on.

Did you successfully clone the HDD operating system to the SSD? If this is true you should be able to boot to Windows with only the SSD connected to SATA0. Is the new SATA SSD detected by the BIOS when connected to SATA data and SATA power?

What disk are you booting to when both devices are connected to SATA ports? It sounds like you can only boot to the HDD.

I don't know why this is happening. I have never had a problem copying a fully functional operating system image (using: Macrium, Paragon, or Acronis disk imaging and cloning software) from a HDD to a different: SATA HDD, SATA SSD, or a M.2 NVME SSD.

Either: the process you are using to clone the operating system to the new SSD is not being done correctly or the SSD you purchased has issues.

You cannot clone a source HDD volume containing data that exceeds the capacity of the target SSD. This means if you have a 1 TB HDD storing 400 GBs of data, you cannot clone this disk to a 256 GB SSD. But the clone operation should abort with an error message that the source disk image exceeds the capacity of the target disk.

Regards