Making original HDD bootable after SSD upgrade.

Question

My Inspiron 5570 shipped with a 1 TB HDD and Windows 10. I upgraded to Windows 11 a few years back and shortly after that I installed a 500GB M.2 SSD drive. Everything went fine and the machine boots from the SSD and I disabled the HDD via the BIOS as I didn't need it.

Fast forward to today and I want to revert to the HDD, delete my data from the SSD and then remove it.

Since this is UEFI there is no option to change the boot order in the BIOS. If I check the drives in Disk Management the SSD shows as "Boot" whereas the HDD does not. If I disable the SSD in the BIOS the machine won't boot because it doesn't see the HDD as a bootable drive.

I must have done something to make the SSD bootable back when I installed it, which I now have to reverse to make the HDD the drive Windows boots from. But I can't remember what I need to do.

So, how do I make the HDD the bootable drive and remove the "Boot" marker from the SSD?

James76G · Accepted Answer

Pleased to report that this is solved, which was done using the "accepted solution" from this thread.

Solved: How to repair broken EFI partition - Dell Community

This is the same as the link in post 4 above, but the instructions were clearer on that thread.

So now my Inspiron has booted successfully from the HDD and I've got three years of Windows 10 updates to go through. It is also much much slower than with the SSD - I'd forgotten how wide the gap was though.

ejn63 · Answer

EFI boot loader repair: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000124331/how-to-repair-the-efi-bootloader-on-a-gpt-hdd-for-windows-7-8-8-1-and-10-on-your-dell-pc

JOcean · Answer

This web page at Recoverit explains how to convert a Basic Data Partition to a Primary Partition.

James76G · Answer

Thanks but that isn't relevant here. What that article suggests involves deleting a partition which I don't want to do. Also why would I want to convert to a Primary Partition since that would not work for a UEFI based systems and that is what I have.

JOcean · Answer

Sorry for the misinformation as I missed that part of your post. @ejn63 is thorough and spot on.

Saltgrass · Answer

A drawback of UEFI systems is you cannot tell which EFI partition is the actual System partition. Since you have two, I will assume you are booting from and using the SSD?

If you actually have two bootable EFI system partitions and they aren't copies, you may have a Windows Boot Manager for each partition. I am not sure how you configured the SSD the way you show, but things must have been copied over. I suppose you don't show a second one on your Boot device menu using the F12 key during boot?

If you get a chance, run the command below in an admin command prompt and copy and paste the results.

bcdedit

James76G · Answer

Yes, currently booting from SSD, but as mentioned I want to revert to booting from the HDD.

I cloned the SSD from the HDD but I can't recall what software I used. It is a Samsung SSD and so maybe it was with Samsung Magician.

You are right, there is only one boot option when I press F12 simply called "Windows Boot Manager"

Here's the text from running BCDEdit:

path \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {ebe5ab32-5535-11ed-9819-5cea1d2cf2b8}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.efi
description Windows 11
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {ebe5ab35-5535-11ed-9819-5cea1d2cf2b8}
displaymessageoverride Recovery
recoveryenabled Yes
isolatedcontext Yes
allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \WINDOWS
resumeobject {ebe5ab32-5535-11ed-9819-5cea1d2cf2b8}
nx OptIn
bootmenupolicy Standard

C:\>cd\

Saltgrass · Answer

You sort of left off the first two lines of the Boot Manager entry. This is what tells us from where it is booting.

Hopefully the others will solve this for you but one thing you might try, if you have a way to run it is to use the Bootrec command to find other OS installations. This particular command is not normally run from Windows, but from the Recovery tools.

bootrec /scan0s

If it finds a new OS, you can add it by using this command.

bootrec /rebuildbcd

The utility looks for an OS that is not currently listed in the BCD store. If it finds one, it will ask if you want to add it.

James76G · Answer

Thanks, I'll give that a try tomorrow (it's late here in the UK).

Here's those extra lines from BCDEdit - hadn't realised it had chopped them off previously.

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume7
path \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {ebe5ab32-5535-11ed-9819-5cea1d2cf2b8}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.efi
description Windows 11
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {ebe5ab35-5535-11ed-9819-5cea1d2cf2b8}
displaymessageoverride Recovery
recoveryenabled Yes
isolatedcontext Yes
allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \WINDOWS
resumeobject {ebe5ab32-5535-11ed-9819-5cea1d2cf2b8}
nx OptIn
bootmenupolicy Standard

Inspiron

Making original HDD bootable after SSD upgrade.

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