New SSD works; new mass storage hard drive doesn't

prosze

Reputable
Jul 21, 2014
2
0
4,510
hard drive died. installed new SSD and a clean install of win 7. mobo is ASUS. new SSD works great. bought and installed a new hard drive for mass storage. when I tried to boot up discovered the boot SSD was missing from the bios boot order section, although the SSD was detected.
the SSD has to be set to AHCI...tried both AHCI and IDE for the hard drive, but nothing works.
have to unplug the hard drive...and the SSD is back in 1st boot place in the bios and windows boots normally. Seagate support recommended driver update from ASUS..no help. Anyone have any ideas? FYI the mobo is only sata II. tks. lee
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
I'm not familiar with your mobo and BIOS, but here are a few ideas appropriate for SOME mobos.

With both the SSD and new HDD installed, you should ensure that they are both plugged into the mobo's main SATA ports, and not a secondary set of ports run by a different controller chip. Make sure they are Enabled (I bet they are already) and set them to AHCI mode.

Now go to where you set the Boot Priority Sequence. Ideally you probably want the first device tried for booting to be your optical drive, then your SSD, and NO mention of the HDD in the boot sequence. When you go to set these things, sometimes the choice of "Hard Drive" looks like there is only one to choose from, but actually it's just showing a default choice there and it contains a sub-menu that offers you all of the storage units present. So you have to look through there and select the SSD. After you've made your changes, remember to SAVE and EXIT. Your machine should boot into Windows from the SSD.

If you get that far, you will now have to Initialize your new empty HDD - Win 7 probably uses the term Create a New Simple Volume. This is done in Disk Management. If you're not familiar with that, read WyomingKnott's sticky here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265764-32-guide-installed-disk-system

with emphasis on his Step 5.

Good Luck!