How to boot from a cloned second SSD

[ReaverDMV]

This is for my 15" HP Envy laptop 2020 model, ep0098nr. I added a second internal SSD drive to the additional empty slot in the laptop, then used Macrium Reflect to clone the original drive to the new one. I now want to make the new one the bootable drive, so that I can wipe the original drive and just use it for extra space. Is this possible on this laptop?

I followed this instructions in this link: How To Clone a Hard Drive in Windows 10 | HP® Tech Takes and all went well until step 5: Make your new hard drive bootable. When I go into the boot tab of BIOS to change the boot priority, there is no option for the new hard drive.

Is there any way around this? Do I have to reinstall Windows on the new hard drive?

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

If you retained the 2.5" drive, the Windows boot manager automatically boots from the 2.5" drive first.

Temporarily disconnect the 2.5" drive and the Windows boot manager should boot from the NVMe SSD.

Run it off the NVMe SSD for a while, restart, shut down, etc., and after you have put the drive through its paces, shut down the notebook and reconnect the 2.5" drive.

If the Windows boot manager switches back to the 2.5" drive, you will need to clean the 2.5" disk using Diskpart and format the drive to be used as storage only.

[ReaverDMV]

That did the trick, thank you! For the record, I removed the old drive and started the laptop again with just the new drive (cloned from the old one), and it booted right up and I can now see in Disk Management that the new drive has a partition listed with the Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, and Basic Data Partition attributes. When I put the old drive back in, it is now listed with just a Basic Data Partition in Disk Management.

One final question: I can now just format and wipe the old drive and use it as extra storage, correct?

Thanks again for your on point help!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Yes, you can now format the HDD and use it for storage only.

[ReaverDMV]

I actually have one final question. When I put the old hard drive back in, it was locked by BitLocker and I had to enter my encryption key to unlock it. Under my Microsoft account, I only have one key listed for this laptop, and that one was able to unlock the old drive. But now I'm wondering, since I only have one key listed under my Microsoft account, do both hard drives have the same key since they are clones? If not, and if the new hard drive has a different key, where can I find the new key?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Unfortunately, that I do not know.

If I had to take a guess, I would say the key is good for any drives installed.

I always turn Bitlocker off in Windows as soon as possible.