Force boot from SSD

[todden]

I have installed a Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 1TB SSD on my Omen laptop. Install and cloning went well. Disconnected the HDD and booted from the SSD - all good. Reconnected the HDD; now I must always press F9- UEFI- and select the SSD; if not it will boot from the HDD. The ultimate solution is to wipe my HDD, but is there a way to force the machine to boot from the SSD with the current configuration? I'm kind of hesitant to delete the Windows-partition on my HDD until I trust the SSD completely ... I even renamed the partition to something other than Windows but that didn't make any difference.

Not much you can do in the BIOS of this machine and I have not found a way to make the SSD primary instead of the HDD.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@todden 

Looks like when both the SSD and HDD are connected, the UEFI settings are forcing the SSD to be device One, and the HDD to be device Zero.

You need to go into Settings and look for the option to order the devices so that the SSD is listed before the HDD.

[todden]

Problem solved!

It is amazing when somebody points out the solution you pay more attention ... I have gone through the BIOS setup 10's of times, including in the UEFI boot setting, without finding the setting that works. I used arrow keys up and down, pressed F10, nothing helped to changed the order.

Turns out pressing F5/F6 changes the order in the menu, and once I moved the SSD to the top, it boots from it every time!

So thank you to WAWood for pointing me in the right direction!