Laptop HP 350 G2 migrate Win 10 from HDD to new SSD

[Chris1979]

HP 350 G2 L8B05ES Notebook 15,6" HD, Intel Core i5-5200U, 4GB, 750GB, Win7 Pro + Win8.1 Pro ungraded to Win 10 3 yrs ago

Dear all,

I tried to migrate Win 10 from an original 2.5" HP 750GB HDD drive to a new HP S700 Pro 2.5" 512GB SSD because the notebook is really slow for office use although its hardware would expect reasonably fast opening and closing of files and office programs which it didnt. Win 10 helped a bit and last December I purchased a HP SSD and spent many of hours trying to migrate to SSD but nothing worked ultimately. 

I used various freeware partition and cloning programs such as Aconis and Minitool which copied or cloned the partitions and files on the new SSD drive. Until here I managed to follow the steps. 

However, when I physically replaced the HHD with new SSD in the internal slot of the notebook and restarted again the notebook always fails to start and delivers the following message:

Boot device not found.

Please install an operating system on your hard drive.

Hard Disk (3F0)

F2 System diagnotics

For more information, please visit: www.hp.com /....

In BIOS, the UEFI mode and the legacy boot mode is enabled because the source drive does only boot in the legacy mode. I left it unchanged. However, under the UEFI mode no hard drive is listed. 

Is there any HP system tool that prevents migrating to a new SSD?

Why does BIOS not find the OS on the SSD?

Is there an update for BIOS available which might help?

Best regards

Chris

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi, Chris:

What I would suggest is to see if you can clean install W10 on the new SSD and see if that works.

You can do so for free as follows...

You can make a W10 USB flash drive installer with the Microsoft Media Creation Tool, using an 8 GB flash drive using another Windows PC, if your PC is not working.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

If you are asked to enter a product key during the installation process, select the 'I don't have a product key' option, and W10 will install and automatically activate once you are connected to the internet.

Here are the steps to create the W10 USB flash drive installer...

Select Download tool now, and select Run.If you agree to the license terms, select Accept.

On the What do you want to do? page, select Create installation media for another PC, and then select Next.

Select the language, edition, and architecture (64-bit or 32-bit) for Windows 10. You want 64 bit. 

Select which media you want to use:  USB flash drive. Plug in a blank USB flash drive with at least 8GB of space. Any content on the flash drive will be deleted.

After W10 installs, you can install the drivers and available software from your PC's support page.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-350-g2-notebook-pc/6943794

I have the HP 350 G1 (4th gen core processor). I installed an Intel 535 SSD and it worked fine right from the start.

I did not clone the drive.  I clean installed W10 and reinstalled my programs and files.

[Chris1979]

Hi Paul,

Thank you very much!

This solution worked well and was very fast compared to clone or migrate.

Less then 1 hour.

Best regards

Chris

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome, Chris.

Once you get everything set up the way you want it, (BTW, W10 v1903 came out yesterday), you can use this free disk imaging utility to create a system image and bootable rescue media to access your system image for a quick restore.

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree?x-ca=blog

You can update the image any time you want.  I create a new system image every month.