Hello! I'm Mike and I've been working for the past 4 days on attempting to copy my files to my newly installed M.2 Solid state drive, and then setting that drive as the boot drive to enhance the performance of my Dell Alienware 17 R4 laptop. I've done an array of things, which so far has not led me to getting the SSD as an actual bootable drive. I'm not extremely tech savvy however I've learned quite a lot through YouTube tutorials.

To be clear, bios recognizes my SSD and so does everywhere else on my laptop

Here's what i've tried to do so far:
- Changed my BIOS boot mode from UEFI to Legacy and back etc.
- Changed secure boot on and off (tried loading up and checking the options in boot priority, still no luck)
- Changed from RAID to ACHI and back (no luck either)
- Cloned my disk (seemed obvious but that didn't make it a possible option)
- switching the SSD from the 2nd slot to the 3rd slot in my laptop
- Installing a copy of windows onto the SSD, wiping it, doing it again, trying with and without the added cloned data from my HDD
- Taking it out, putting it back in
- trying my f2 quick boot options and my f12 (bios menu)
- checked here at the forums

- looked at at least a dozen YouTube videos (I can list them if need be)
- Unplugging my HDD and testing just the SSD itself

and so far, to no avail. I'd like to think that the SSD is in good condition as I just received it several days ago and it had no visible damage, along with no hardware failures coming back when I run test. Also important to note, I've updated my bios to the latest version through the dell support website.

The main issue I've been having with this whole process is that every source has either a different bios, or a different device making this difficult since I haven't seen a bios remotely similar to mine yet. My bios is Aptio Setup Utility, but the ones I've seen look different so I'm guessing they're either old or even newer than the one I'm able to have.

As of right now I'm willing to try anything possible, just to have my SSD as a selectable drive. If anyone has any help, it'd be deeply appreciated.

Ps. I asked this on Microsoft Forum however they suggested I come here since it could be a more dell specific issue.

Sincerely - Mike