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XPS 8900, will not recognize Samsung 860 EVO as boot drive
I am having issues with my Dell XPS-8900 PC recognizing a new samsung 860 EVO as my boot drive. Original PC came with a 2Tb drive w/32GB flash. I wanted to upgrade to a 860 EVO 1Tb drive as my new W7 boot drive (will also be upgrading to W10 soon). I installed the SSD and PC recognized it as a new blank drive. Not sure if matters, but I also have two other 6 TB hardrives connected in addition to the original 2TB drive and new 1 TB SSD drive. I tried using the samsung migration tool to complete a clone of my existing HDD to the new SSD. The tool immediately errored out on start where it would not start the clone. Samsung Tech support did not know why but suggested I could run a disk check on my existing HDD to make sure it did not have any bad sectors. Considering how migration tool failed immediately after hitting start, I cannot image it even had time to find any bad sectors on my old hard drive. Any, used the Macrium Reflect clone software to successfully clone my HDD to the new SSD. rebooted PC and in the bios setup all four drives are recognized. I updated the boot sequence to boot to the new SSD but it only continued to boot to the old HDD still connected. I than disconnected the old HDD to drive again and this time I received an error that a boot drive could not be found.
I understood from Samsung that the new SSD does not need to have any new firmware to install to use drive as a boot drive.
Any idea on what else i can try to get the drive to be recognized as a boot drive?
Vic384
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October 19th, 2019 18:00
Check the SSD and your boot HDD in Disk Management to make sure you have cloned all the partitions of the HDD.You should have an EFI System Partition on the SSD. When you boot the system the boot HDD should be disconnected.
Shooter71
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October 19th, 2019 20:00
I previous;u tried disconnecting the original HDD drive but that did not resolve the issue. Using the Marcium Reflect clone software, I thought the software correctly cloned the drive, but when I review the partitions in disk management I am not yet sure. Does not look like I can attach an image her to show the Disk Management window but in the Disk Management under Disk 0 (Original 2TB HDD) there are three partitions:
1) 39MB Healthy (OEM Partition)
2) 11.73 GB Healthy (Active, Recovery Partition)
3) OS (C:) 1851.24 GB NTFS Health (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
But when I look at the three partitions cloned to the SSD drive, they are not identical for Disk 1:
1) 39 MB Healthy (OEM Partition)
2) 11.73 Healthy (Recovery Partition)
3) OS (P:) 919.74 GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)
I also cannot tell how to determine if there is a EFI System partition on the new SSD as you suggest that should there (as I also don't see something like that in the original HDD either. Does the fact that the new (P:) drive does not show Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, before the primary partition description imply that the clone did not actually clone it correctly some how?
Vic384
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October 20th, 2019 07:00
It is possible that Macrium Reflect did clone the HDD correctly and that Disk Management does not show Boot, Page File, and Crash Dump on the SSD is because it is not the boot disk (it was P: drive) when you ran Disk Management.
I went back to read your original post and I think Samsung Migration should have worked. There may be a problem with the 32MB cache. I think you should disable the cache before you try to clone the HDD. The Intel Rapid Storage Technology app is used to disable acceleration. I am not sure what happens if you disconnect the HDD with the cache still enabled.
There is another issue that you should consider, maybe not right now but later on after you get the SSD to boot. Samsung Magician software requires that the SSD SATA operation be set to AHCI vs RAID in the BIOS. Dell normally sets SATA operation to RAID. If you clone your HDD to your SSD, Windows 7 on the SSD will be in the same SATA mode as on the HDD. If you decide to change from RAID to AHCI you should follow this procedure to enable the AHCI driver before changing the SATA mode of the boot drive: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/922976/error-message-occurs-after-you-change-the-sata-mode-of-the-boot-drive