New SSD system won't boot

I have a pretty old system that I have been doing a little upgrading on. Current specs are reflected in my profile. Plan was to replace the old 128gb ssd and spinner HDD with a 2TB ssd (Wester Digital Blue) and do a fresh win10 install on it.

The system was working fine before I tried the ssd replacement, if a little sluggish (add'l RAM is on the way too).

I used the media creation tool from MS to create a bootable Win10 usb stick. I set the BIOS to boot from USB first. I then removed the old SSD, and installed the new SSD. System would not boot. Well, I don't know what it did, because it would not initiate the display. So it may have booted and I don't know.

I swapped the SSDs again, and system booted fine. Rebooted and checked BIOS, and everything was fine. I even ensured both video sources were active (GPU card, and the i7's intel HD graphics). Rebooted checking both video output methods, all ok. Swapped SSDs again, screen would not initiate, with either video out source.

This time I connected both SSDs and system booted fine, but windows did not recognize the new SSD in Windows Explorer. I rebooted to BIOS, and the BIOS showed the new SSD as a slave to the optical drive..... huh?

Decided to disconnect all drives but SSDs, and moved each SSD to separate SATA channels. Rebooted to BIOS, now each SSD is shown as a master on separate channels. OK. Rebooted again, and.... nothing. Display won't initiate, even with old SSD.

At this point I went to bed. :)

Is there anything anyone can think of I'm doing wrong? Do I simply have a bad SSD? Or is my mobo / chipset failing? Does the old Intel z68 chipset SATA controller have an issue with such a large SSD (2TB)?

Thanks for any tips/ideas/suggestions/commiserations....

Sounds like serious problems since SATA ports do not have masters and slaves.

NavyLCDR said:

Sounds like serious problems since SATA ports do not have masters and slaves.

I don't know about that, but my mobo owners manual describes master/slave in the SATA setup section:

From what I can determine, that motherboard supports SATA SSD drives up to a capacity of 4 TB.

Why don't you remove both the old SSD and HDD drives, then install the new SSD drive, then boot from your USB install media, then do a clean install of Windows 10?

flavallee said:

From what I can determine, that motherboard supports SATA SSD drives up to a capacity of 4 TB.

Why don't you remove both the old 128 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD drives, then install the new 2 TB SSD drive, then boot from your USB install media, then do a clean install of Windows 10?

I think I tried that, but will try again. Right now I can't seem to get the display to initiate at all in any config. Checked the monitor just to be sure, and it works on my laptop.

You could try to manually setup the new SSD. Create a system partition on it to boot from followed by the partition for Windows 10/11. Apply Windows 10/11 from install.esd or install.wim from the sources folder of the installation USB flash drive. Then put the boot files into the system partition using bcdboot. At that point the SSD should be bootable on its own.

NavyLCDR said:

You could try to manually setup the new SSD. Create a system partition on it to boot from followed by the partition for Windows 10/11. Apply Windows 10/11 from install.esd or install.wim from the sources folder of the installation USB flash drive. Then put the boot files into the system partition using bcdboot. At that point the SSD should be bootable on its own.

I'd have to have another desktop that I could power it up from, and boot into windows from, and currently this one seems to be dead.

Question: with a normal Award BIOS, shouldn't I be able to boot to BIOS, even with zero drives connected? Or would this cause the system to fail POST? I tried that disconnecting everything, to just get into the bios, and the motherboard just refuses to display anything.

You should be able to get into Bios with no drives connected. You can try removing the video card and plugging the monitor into the motherboard video connection.

NavyLCDR said:

You should be able to get into Bios with no drives connected. You can try removing the video card and plugging the monitor into the motherboard video connection.

Yep, that's exactly where I'm at right now. I've got just the mobo, connected to PSU, and hdmi out to monitor from mobo. Literally nothing else is connected to mobo, just cpu and RAM. PSU powers up, all fans power up. Display gets nothing.

I'll try putting the GPU card back in and see if it can display something.

I'm pretty ESD safe, but starting to wonder if I inadvertently shocked something while swapping things around. This is nuts. It was working fine yesterday and gradually devolved to a brick.

- - - Updated - - -

Progress!

I'm back in the bios, using the GPU card instead of the onboard video. Not sure why that worked this time. Going to try just adding the new SSD only and see if I can install win10.

- - - Updated - - -

Update2 - Win10 is installing on the new SSD. No other devices installed.
I changed the SATA to AHCI instead of IDE for this install. Not sure if this is the reason, or if this is normal, but the SSD did not show up in the BIOS. But when I booted to the Win10 install usb I made, it sees the SSD and is installing to it now. Hmmm.... we shall see.

SATA SSDs (and HDDs) should be set to AHCI mode unless you are going to set up a RAID array.