Trying to upgrade SSD, but the new one is not being recognized as bootable

[theWeleho]

Hello,

I'm trying to upgrade to a new SSD but I'm having booting troubles.

So, I successfully cloned everything to the new ssd and booted it. No problems there. But when I insert the old ssd in to the second M.2 slot on the laptop, it only boots from it. It's the only one that shows up in the bios boot menu - but when the new drive is by it self, then it shows up.

[banhien]

@theWeleho 

You have to format the old drive, this should work

Regards.

[theWeleho]

I'm not sure if I get what you mean. I have formatted the drive before having windows installed on it, and it runs perfectly by it self. Is there some formating feature I'm missing

[tk_srq]

@theWeleho,

You installed the new SSD in the empty second slot and cloned the factory-installed SSD to the new drive, correct?

And when you removed the stock SSD, you were able to boot from the new drive in the secondary slot, but when you put the original drive back in the primary slot, the system only boots from the stock drive and doesn't even recognize the new SSD, correct?

If both of the above things are correct, try to swap the drives around, and the system should now boot from the new drive in the primary slot.

You can reformat the old drive and use it for data storage, or you can leave it as it is until you are sure the cloned new drive works ok.

[theWeleho]

Yes, imI did precicely that.

I tried swapping around the drives, it still boots from the old one.

After poking around, I found that I could boot through new drive from the troubleshoot screen. But it still does not solve the issue, since I cannot chnage the boot priority, because inside msconfig it only recognizes the drive&system I booted from.

[tk_srq]

If that's the case, you may need to reformat the stock drive, but this will erase the entire data on the drive.

Or you can just delete the EFI partition only on the drive that stores boot files and keep the Windows partition (C: \ drive) and Recovery partition intact. If you delete the EFI partition, the stock drive no longer boots, and the system should boot from the new drive.

You can get these things done from F11 Recovery Options (you need to tap the F11 key on bootup).

Let me know what you want to do.

BTW, just wondering, is the new NVMe SSD gen4 or gen3? 

The primary slot on Victus 16-d0000 models is gen4, and your stock SSD should be gen4. If your new drive is gen4, you can use it as a boot drive, but if it is gen3, you may keep the stock drive as a boot drive in the primary slot and use the new one for data storage. 

[theWeleho]

Thank you for the insight, I got to the same conclusion that deleting is probably the way, I'll test  thw new drice for few days to make sure it works properly. The new one is a gen 4 drive.

The Disk management doesn't let me touch the EFI files on (neither) drive, all options are grayed out, but I could delete windows. I'll check the recovery options as you suggested.

One curious detail is that the computer calls the one in use always C, and old changes to D while not in use, and the new into W (which is what I assigned). Something going on there, I suppose.

[tk_srq · Accepted solution]

If you have multiple bootable drives in the system with each drive having a working Windows partition, whichever drive you boot from always has the Windows partition labeled as C:\ drive. That's the way it is.

In your case, if you boot from the old drive, its Windows partition is called as C:\ drive and the new drive now has the Windows partition assigned D:\drive. 

Since you can boot from the new drive manually, see if you can run command prompt to wipe the old SSD. See this Seagate article for how to do it.

How to Diskpart Erase/Clean a Drive Through the Command Prompt | Seagate US

If you encounter an error, you may need to run command prompt from F11 System Recovery menu.

[theWeleho]

Okay, I test ran the new SSD for a week and did all the diagnostic tests to make sure it worked. Then I wiped the old drive. Next time I bootet the laptop up, windows couldn't boot.

So I'm trying a clean instal, but how do I get the drivers for the laptop, more importantly for the disk so I can instal windows?

[tk_srq]

I was wondering what happened. Did you select the new drive by accident and wipe it off?

If your problem is that the Windows installer doesn't detect the storage drives, you need to supply Intel RST storage drivers to the Windows installer, as your model has an Intel i7 11th gen processor. Here's what you need to do:

1. Use a Windows installation usb drive created with Microsoft Media Creation Tool (an ISO file-based installation usb drives tend to cause errors during the IRST driver installation).

2. Download Intel RST driver from the link below. Run it as administrator and follow the on-screen instructions to perform the driver extraction.

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp146501-147000/sp146929.exe

3. Go to C:\SWSetup\sp146929. Double click the sp146929 folder and copy the F6 folder to the root directory of a Windows installation usb drive. The F6 folder contains IRST drivers which the installation setup needs to detect the storage drive.

4. Connect the usb drive to the notebook and boot the system from the usb drive. When asked where to install Windows, click on Load Driver -> Browse -> the usb drive in the window that opens -> the F6 folder -> OK.

5. Multiple .inf driver files may be displayed. Select one and click Next.

6. Two storage drives will be displayed. If the new SSD drive shows any partitions, delete each of all the partitions only to see 'unallocated space.'  Select it and click on Next to proceed the installation.