Boot device not found when trying to reinstall windows 10

TaviM · ‎11-10-2020

I purchased a new intel ssd and replaced it with the original ssd in the system because it has more capacity. I installed a new copy of windows on an external drive and plugged it into the pc to boot up windows but I get an error that says boot device not found please install an operating system on your hard disk hard disk 3fo. I hope someone knows how to fix this thanks.

Brikimg · ‎11-11-2020

TaviM, Sounds like you need to select the correct drive to boot from ... Reboot, and slowly tap the ESC key until you get the bios menu and change your boot options to allow USB booting. Now, depending on how you installed windows on the external you might need to ensure the Legacy USB is available. I will need to get into my BIOS to be more specific.

However, the usual method of swapping to an SSD is to attach the SSD as an external drive FIRST. Then use a cloning software to clone the existing HDD to the SSD. After that is done, you simply swap the SSD into the computer and boot up ... everything is as it was, but now on the faster drive. There are certain caveats - like going from larger/smaller to smaller/larger drive, etc ... If your SSD does not offer something like Acronis True Image, then you can use EASEUS backup which will do the job (it's free). If you go the clone route, you should also have the recovery partition and can do a Windows RESET, if you want to also go back to the brand new PC experience. Of course, you will need some kind of M.2 to USB enclosure to do this. You can get one of those from Amazon, for example: https://www.amazon.com/M-2-External-Converter-Adapter-Enclosure/dp/B076DCNZM3. So, if you still have the original M.2 drive intact, you can still do the clone route and (maybe) save some hassle of installing everything from scratch.

Another option would be to get an M.2 to SATA adapter and put the smaller M.2 drive you removed, back into the PC as a SATA internal drive. You would use something like this: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-M-2-2-5in-SATA-Adapter/dp/B00ITJ7U20.

I hope I was not too confusing here... there are many ways to go. Over the past several days, I just replaced my failing laptop HHD with an SSD (I cloned it). Not hard but time consuming and tedious if you have lots of software to re-install.

Cheers,
Brian

ailsa99 · ‎11-11-2020

There are multiple reasons for the boot device not found please install an operating system on your hard disk, hard disk 3f0:

Wrong boot order in BIOS
Hard disk connection problem
Outdated or misconfigured BIOS
Corrupted or died bootable disk
Damaged system files…

To fix the boot device not found error:

Refer to the link: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/Boot-Device-Not-Found-Hard-Dis...

Or

Try the following ways:

Perform a hard reset
Restore default settings of BIOS
Test the hard drive using HP PC Hardware Diagnostics
Run system recovery with HP Recovery Manager

Please refer to boot device not found 3f0 error for more details.