Samsung SSD Install Failure HP Pavilion 17 Laptop

[Strider2]

I am trying to upgrade my wife's HP Pavilion 17 - 1 Tb HDD to a Samsung 870 EVO 1 Tb SSD. The Pavilion is running Windows 10 with 16 GB RAM and the factory installed GPT HDD has 329 GB free space. I installed the Samsung Data Migration tool and it sees the new SSD and starts to run. No change at the bottom status area and after about 2 minutes the tool just closes with no errors and no cloning. I find no errors in the tool log and nothing in the system logs. I tried the same SSD drive on another laptop and it successfully worked, however it does have a smaller drive. So the SSD drive and the SATA to USB adapter are working correctly. I tried another cloning software with the Pavilion and it successfully ran but when I swapped out the HDD for the newly cloned SSD the laptop would not boot with the new drive. I even tried using a recovery USB to make the newly installed SSD work but to no avail.  Then I swapped back the old HDD and the laptop works fine.  Any suggestions?

[erico]

I have never had any success using the Samsung Data Migration tool.

Which footprint type is the Samsung 870 EVO SSD?

Are you using an enclosure to put the SSD in when you are cloning it?

Here are examples of the SSD drive types: M.2, 2.5" ?

The manual for your notebook shows other than the NVMe type SSD drives as being compatible, although many owners and others  state that the NVMe SSD types work. Did you verify that the new SSD was recognized as being present by the BIOS and then put it in the first boot position?

Notebook  Maintenance & Service Manual  shows the following as the compatible drive type:

Support M.2 SATA-3 (NGFF)
M.2 SATA configurations(TLC)

@sherip99 

If he cloned it, the new SSD will be the very same volume type and format type as the original HDD.

[sherip99]

Is the SSD also GPT? It may be necessary to initialize it as GPT before cloning. If that is fine and can't boot, can you get into Safe Mode on the clone? Not sure about your laptop, but if I tap the escape key repeatedly on my laptop during startup, I get a menu that includes safe mode as an option. Your system may use a different key. FWIW (different laptop and different drive), I recently succeeded in "fixing" a non-booting newly cloned drive. In safe mode, I went to Device Manager and tried to disable the storage controller device named similar to Intel RST controller. It hung trying to disable it so I had to cold start. But after that it booted. I went back to Device Manager and reenabled the device. Everything worked fine after that.

[Strider2]

Yes the SSD is GPT, that is the first thing that I checked.  I cannot get to safe mode.  After the first failure I put back the original HDD and created a recovery USB from the Pavilion HDD and then swapped the drives again.  When I powered on the Pavilion I get an immediate Recovery blue screen that states "Your PC/Device needs to be repaired.  A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed.  Error code 0xc0000225".

of the 4 options the only one that seemed to work was the F1 Recovery Environment.  This when I used the recovery USB, which seemed to be working but ultimately failed with another blue screen.

[erico]

@Strider2 

I see that you have not read my last post completely.

you have apparently  decided to keep fighting with uses of a drive type that is apparently not compatible with your notebook.

You are trying to use an NVMe  SSD when a SATA3 (NGFF) is what is needed, according to the maintenance & Service guide that HP provided for your notebook model series.

That is also what mainstream memory manufacturer Crucial recommends.

https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/hp---compaq/pavilion-17-f223cl

[Strider2]

The 870 EVO is  a 2.5" SATA drive, not an NVMe.

[erico]

Ok.

There is likely to be a BCD error.  If the BIOS doesn't not know where to find it, it won't boot.

If you leave the Samsung 870 EVO in place and boot up with a Windows USB flash drive, you will be able to access the Command line and use the Windows Diskpart utility to see if the disk is set to be bootable and has a drive letter.

If you do not know how to do that just let me know and I will provide a link that will explain how to do that.  In the article I wrote in the Notebook Knowledge base on upgrading to an SSD, I explained how to invoke and use the Diskpart utility .

[Strider2]

The problem has been solved.

Here is what I did yesterday and this morning, note the SATA SSD is connected via a USB adapter.  I decided to start over and carefully went through troubleshooting the problem.

1. I reinitialized the SDD with Diskpart.

2. Attempted  to clone with the Samsung data migration tool, I have used this before on the same type of drive with success.

3. This cloning failed to work and the software closed after about 2 minutes.

4. I used different cloning software that ran for several hours and completed successfully.

5. I tried to boot off of the USB attached SSD, which failed, and the laptop booted off of the HDD.

6. Using windows explorer I noticed that the SSD, which was still connected, was not found.

7. Using Diskpart I saw that the SSD was connected but it was OFFLINE.

8. Using Diskpart I set the SSD to online.  The SSD and its contents were now seen on windows explorer.

9. Using Disk Management I verified that the SSD had the same partition structures that the HDD had.

10. I swapped the drives and SUCCESS the laptop booted correctly.

I am not sure why the disk was marked as offline, but the lesson is check the disk status before trying other things.  Sometimes its the simple things that can drive you crazy.

Thanks to Erico and Sherip99 for their suggestions.

[sherip99]

Possibly because you can't have two GPT drives with the same GUID active at the same time.