BIOS sees SSD, Windows 7 doesn't see it

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_zxzxzx_

_zxzxzx_

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Mar 6, 2012
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Hey there, thanks for taking a look. I've recently bought a new Toshiba Dyna Store 240GB SSD for a relative's old PC. Relevant details are:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP35-DSP3
OS: Windows 7 Pro SP1
Other HDD: Toshiba 3TB 3.5"

The OS was previously installed on a partition of the 3TB hard drive, but due to a limitation of the motherboard (doesn't support GPT booting), only 2TB of the drive space remained usable. I cloned the system partition of the HDD onto the SSD, created a new BCD on the SSD to boot from it and expected it to work. It shows up in the BIOS properly, but there seems to be some kind of error as it can't run "winload.exe". Usually, hitting the repair button from the Windows 7 DVD works, but the SSD isn't even detected by the installer. I've tried booting back into the old Windows 7 install, and it can't find the SSD either. It doesn't show up in disk management or diskpart at all which is one of the strangest things I've seen. The SSD uses the same SATA channel and controller as the original HDD so it shouldn't be a driver issue.

Hope someone can help me out with this as I'm pretty stumped.
 
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_zxzxzx_
Thanks for the response herrwizo. I actually ended up working this one out after a few more hours of troubleshooting. I already had AHCI mode switched on, but I changed the SATA ports around so that the drives were on different controllers instead and that allowed me to see the SSD in Windows. I then repaired the boot files, and then I could finally boot from it. The root of the problem lay with the cloning software that I used - HDClone, which also clones the drive signature. Two drives can't have the same sig, so the other one wasn't showing up at all before when they were on the same controller. Even after I switched it to another controller, I had to set it to 'online' in disk management, which automatically assigns it a new sig...
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_zxzxzx_

_zxzxzx_

Honorable
Mar 6, 2012
459
0
10,860
Thanks for the response herrwizo. I actually ended up working this one out after a few more hours of troubleshooting. I already had AHCI mode switched on, but I changed the SATA ports around so that the drives were on different controllers instead and that allowed me to see the SSD in Windows. I then repaired the boot files, and then I could finally boot from it. The root of the problem lay with the cloning software that I used - HDClone, which also clones the drive signature. Two drives can't have the same sig, so the other one wasn't showing up at all before when they were on the same controller. Even after I switched it to another controller, I had to set it to 'online' in disk management, which automatically assigns it a new sig. Not something you'd expect in every HDD to SSD move I guess.
 
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