New desktop PC won't let me boot off of my old drive.

[Yovik]

I just bought a new computer for my grandparents. It will boot into windows 11 with no issues with the included m.2 drive but refuses to recognize the drive with windows 10 on the 2.5" ssd from their old computer. 

The old computer works fine and boots without issues, and I can also access the drive with a drive caddy.

I've tried both SATA power cords in the new computer and both SATA DATA cords with no luck.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Probably the storage controller drivers from the 2.5" SSD with W10 on it are not compatible with the new PC's hardware.

You'll have to reinstall W11 on the 2.5" SSD but if you do, then the PC won't boot from the NVMe SSD.

It's one or the other.

You can't boot two operating systems from two drives.

The Windows boot manager determines what drive to boot from and it will always want to boot from the SATA drive first.

If there is some reason why you want to install a 2.5" SATA SSD in the PC, you can format the drive and use it for additional storage only.

[Yovik]

I'm not trying to dual boot, I just want to he able to boot windows 10 from the 2.5" drive as it has important files and programs that can't easily be moved.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Why can't you just read the drive from windows explorer and copy the files you need from the user profile folders to the new drive?

Second...I need to know exactly what model PC you removed the drive from, and exactly what new model PC you installed the drive into.

I can almost guarantee you what you want to do will not be possible due to the totally different hardware.

[Yovik]

It's an HP Slim Desktop S01-pF4055t. The drive is a previously upgraded 256gb drive from an older optiplex 760. You are probably correct in saying it's not possible, but I've never run in to this problem with any other systems.

I used a caddy to transfer most of what was on the Win10 drive to the new computer but it has the downside of needing most programs to be reinstalled which I don't have the time to do for my folks.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Sorry, but there is no way you will be able to get the drive from an Optiplex 760 which has a legacy BIOS and an Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo processor to boot in the S01-pF4055t, which has an Intel 14th generation core processor, a UEFI BIOS, and supports secure boot. It also uses a much newer Intel storage controller driver.

The drive in the Optiplex was formatted with the MBR partition table, but the new PC uses the GPT partition table and the MBR drive can't boot from the new PC that only supports booting from GPT-formatted drives.

The storage controller drivers are so new that even Microsoft doesn't include the storage controller drivers in their installation media.

You have to go to Intel's website get the applicable storage controller driver and manually load the drivers during the Windows installation process so Windows can find the drive.

Just like we had to do 15 years ago when installing Windows XP in PC's with SATA AHCI controllers when AHCI was first introduced.

You also couldn't transfer the programs to the new PC.

They would need to be reinstalled using the installation media or program setup.exe files.

To sum it up...it's a hard stop as far as getting that drive to work in such a new PC.

I have an Optiplex 7050 MT with an i7-7700 processor.

The NVMe drive is formatted with the GPT partition table because the PC has a UEFI BIOS and supports secure boot, and even that drive would not boot up in the S01-pF4055t due to the much newer architecture.