Upgrade hdd to ssd

[Kobi81]

Here goes... I have an HP Pavilion  15-cw0085nr.  It came w/ a 1TB 5400 rpm hdd. This is a boat anchor on the whole system. I saw that the mother board had an empty M.2 slot and was NVMe compatible so I purchased a 256GB NVMe SSD and fit it to the M.2 slot hoping to just migrate over the OS and run everything from the ssd while keeping the old hdd f/ media storage. But the ssd had different sector size compared to the hdd. 4096 vs 512. So a clean installation of windows 10 seemed easier. The computer is new so I don’t have any files on this computer I care about. But... while windows sees and will use the ssd no problem the BIOS never shows it. Honestly the bios on the laptop is not the best. It feel limited compared to other I’ve used. I also have a 2.5 ssd I can install in place of the hdd and do a clean windows 10 installation but again the bios doesn’t see it. I have been out of the computer game f/ a while so here is my guess... In the bios I see UEFI and Legacy. My understanding is UEFI is newer and legacy goes to about windows 7.  Legacy is currently  “disabled” in my bios so it’s set to UEFI and from what I understand it’s looking f/ that EFI file to boot from. So as the new ssd(s) are empty it makes sense that it’s ignoring them. How might I get this windows 10 moved over to or just clean install to an ssd and bring this system up to its actual speed potential. the bios feels like it’s intentionally preventing my upgrade. Rude 

[Huffer]

So you should have just the M.2 in the system and boot from a Windows 10 install disk. It should see the M.2 SSD and allow you to install to it by clicking the "new" button so it makes the right partitions. What is yours doing that is inconsistent? 

[Kobi81]

Ok. Did as you advised. Just the m.2 installed. Windows did infact see the ssd and installed. And then upon rebooting the laptop said “boot device not found”. Went into bios to correct this and I can’t. The bios won’t see the ssd. So I repeated this sequence w/ a 2.5 ssd in place of the hdd. Same result. I changed from UEFI to legacy because why not. And similar results. The windows install usb saw the 2.5 ssd and let me do an installation. But the hp bios won’t see it as a boot device and doesn’t give me the option to select it as one either.  The mystery deepens...

[Huffer]

Legacy BIOS is for drives formatted as MBR and UEFI wants the GPT file structure . So you can try completely wiping the drive (zero fill) with a "clean all" in diskpart app, and pick a method to install....either UEFI or legacy and I suggest using secure boot and UEFI just to be operating in the 21st century. Prep the disk as a GPT file structure and try again. If you cannot get the system to recognize either an M.2 or 2.5 inch SSD as the bootdisk after a Windows install I fear there is something more fundamental that is wrong here. You might want to try making a new Windows install disk as every once in a while one is corrupted as you make it from the Media Creation Tool.