SSD Upgrade

[Exos]

Bizarre issue here which is becoming more of a nuisance than anything else. Couple of upfront points:

1) Motherboard is at the latest BIOS
2) SSD's are at the latest F/W
3) Model is Asus P8Z68 Pro-V
4) Its a UEFI BIOS.
5) I have a second 128Gb Vertex which is used for Apps', Games and such (not bootable)
6) I have 2 x 1TB RAID drives I use as a dumping partition for downloads etc.

I had a 60Gb Agility 3 installed in my system as the primary boot drive, no problems at all, take an image every week as a backup, so on so forth.

I went to upgrade to Windows 8, but naturally not having enough disk space meant either a fresh install (pain in the proverbial for me) or simply upgrade the disk. I chose to upgrade and bought a 128Gb Vertex4.

Gets it delivered installs it into the system as a secondary drive, checks the bios can see it, boots into windows, formats it and then proceeds to clone Agility > Vertex. Straight forwards...... you would think...

Powers the system off, removes the agility from Port P0, moves the vertex over to Port P0 and then boots into the BIOS to change/ensure the boot drive is set.

No drive is showing in the list for bootable devices, yet the drive is actually showing under the SATA interface and is detected *scratches head*. After a bit of fiddling changes the bios over to EZ mode rather than advanced, chooses a boot device and hey presto it's listed and the drive boots into windows no problem....but only if i manually choose it each time.

If i leave the system to boot on it's own, i simply get a no BOOTMGR message. I have to go into the bios each time change it to EZ mode and select the boot device.

I tried to put the old drive back in and I get the exact same issue?? Nothing has changed. I even changed the BIOS to Legacy mode.

I've tried to repair windows, it doesn't work. however if I remove all the other drives from my system it boots, but i still can't set it as a bootable device in the bios.

I even tried to upgrade to windows 8, goes through the process and fails.

I've tried bootrec to no avail also.

Everything points to the BIOS, but then doing a few searches it's an issue with Windows 7 and SSDs, but there doesn't appear to be any clear resolution.

 

[Him Her]

Might be a dumb question but...

... the new SSD is set up as AHCI, SSD is set to #1 in boot priorities and the new drive is set as the default?

 

[Exos]

Yep AHCI.

This is the issue, i cant set the drive as #1 in the boot preferences..

I can see the drive in everywhere but that location, it just doesn't appear in the list of devices to choose!!

The only current way to boot my PC, is boot it into what ASUS call EZ mode and then choose the device i want to boot from at that given time from the "Boot Menu" (bottom right in the pic)

As you can see from the below example you can set the boot priority, only on mine the device isn't even listed or shown, yet it appears in the POST and in the advanced mode SATA configuration and I can actually boot from the drive but only using the manual method.



I read a bit more earlier today and it seems it is something to do with UEFI and possibly because SSD disks with UEFI BIOS should be set to GPT as it creates different partitions for the BIOS to recognize, MBR is "old hat" supposedly. Additionally much to my delight most people only got around it with a rebuild, and booting into the EFI BIOS on the Win 7 DVD before installing windows.

 

[Him Her]

Some suggestions (bearing in mind I'm not familiar with that mobo):

I thought there was an option to add boot devices to the list? Maybe through the boot menu button?
What happens if you disconnect all other media and try booting? You could run a Windows Repair afterwards (three times in succession).
Have you tried a CMOS reset and reconfigure?
GPT (GUID Partition Table) is where things are going, MBR is heading to 'deprecated' but should still work okay
Not familiar with Acronis but you could try checking the alignment of the SSD although that should only impact performance - use msinfo and check Components, Storage, Disks. Find the SSD and check the Partition Starting Offset is divisible by 4096. If not, there are plenty of free tools to manipulate this including Gparted Live.

 

[Exos]

Some suggestions (bearing in mind I'm not familiar with that mobo):

I thought there was an option to add boot devices to the list? Maybe through the boot menu button?
What happens if you disconnect all other media and try booting? You could run a Windows Repair afterwards (three times in succession).
Have you tried a CMOS reset and reconfigure?
GPT (GUID Partition Table) is where things are going, MBR is heading to 'deprecated' but should still work okay

Not familiar with Acronis but you could try checking the alignment of the SSD although that should only impact performance - use msinfo and check Components, Storage, Disks. Find the SSD and check the Partition Starting Offset is divisible by 4096. If not, there are plenty of free tools to manipulate this including Gparted Live.

No option to add boot devices.

I think i said originally, if i disconnect all other devices it boots fine. Windows repair just says it can't repair anything. But if there was something wrong why would it boot without a device listed in the boot preferences? *scratches head again*

Done a reset already, no change.

Already used Acronis Home 2013, made no difference, even tried to use that instead of ghost to do the clone from the original drive, so no change there either.....

Been through all the bootrec options to to try and fix the partition, even did a robocopy of the bootmgr etc, but the files and everything are already there...

 

[Him Her]

I think i said originally, if i disconnect all other devices it boots fine. Windows repair just says it can't repair anything. But if there was something wrong why would it boot without a device listed in the boot preferences? *scratches head again*

You did, what I wasn't sure was did you run Windows Repair while all the other devices were disconnected? Also, it should be run multiple times in this state.

The comment about Acronis was just that alignment is different on SSD to HDD, since I don't know Acronis I don't know how it handles this but an image copy doesn't usually check alignment?

 

[Exos]

Had to run it a few times as it wouldn't even see the windows install on the first pass, then it fixed it, then it wouldn't fix it, then i couldn't find anything. Then it just booted exactly the same....

I'll probably just end up building from scratch as it's reet annoying....but just takes me days to get my system back to how i like it.

 

[Him Her]

It's a pain but a clean install is usually preferred as Windows 7 sets up the alignment and trim etc. for SSD but you could give EasyBCD (Neosmart) a whirl first - it's free for home use.