SSD upgrade issue - Cannot see hard drive

[Huffer]

I think we can be sure it is not the drive. There is obviously something wrong with the laptop. 

[Edgemaster1]

Well not for nothing but I knew that from my first post. My question is HOW DO I FIX THIS PILE OF JUNK!

[Huffer]

Back to the beginning:

So I got this laptop from a friend of mine used for a good price because it had some problems. 

I would say put in a new motherboard or try to get your money back from your friend. You took a bit of a flyer on it and it has not paid off. 

[Edgemaster1 · Accepted solution]

Hey, so I know this topic is over a year old but I wanted to post this for the community.  I recently corrected this issue.  I had another SSD drive to try in this to see if anything had changed and as I suspected it did not.  When I went to put the mechanical drive back in the laptop stopped reading that as well.  I tested the drive in my desktop drive dock and the drive was fine so I went to inspect the hard drive connection cable and found it appeared there were some broken wires by the mainboard connector.  I ordered a new cable from the HP store and just installed it last night and got the laptop working again.  Just for my own curiosity I wanted to try the SSD once again and after installing the new cable it worked!

I am not sure what might have been wrong with the previous cable prior to it failing completely but somehow that was my issue of not recognizing the SSD drive.

[Huffer]

Classic case where remote assistance is useless if you can't see the machine. A lot of time and effort spent running down a blind alley. 

[Unknown_Joe]

I found a soluition.

My initial problem was very similar.  I wanted a faster HDD so I bought a WD Blue 3d NAND SSD.  I cloned the drive using the free WD Acronis True Image then replaced my old drive.  I double checked the cable after reading the posts here and it was fine.  When the PC would boot up, I kept getting the blue screen with the message that a crucial component was missing. 

After pressing ESC to bring up the Start Up menu:

Select F9 to bring up the Boot Manager. 

Select the 2nd entry in the list.

Note:  The first time I did this, I had two "OS Boot Manager" entries.  I think it creates a new entry each time you select one.

Agree to any other propts.

Once your computer reboots, it should load right in to windows.