PC hanging up at black screen with cursor after replacing SSHD with HD

If your SSHD is still operational,then try cloning it to the HDD,staying with MBR.
I use Macrium Reflect and have not found any problems with cloning or imaging.

take the HDD to your external device and run
diskpart
sel disk #
clean
exit

Connect only the SSD and the HDD to your PC
Does your PC (SATA2) detect the HDD?
open Diskmanagement and check if you get the HDD initialised and formated
Does diskpart detect the HDD?

Have you checked the BIOS boot order? If the BIOS puts your new HDD prior to your SSD in booting order I'd expect a message similar to "please insert a bootable drive and press any key...", but I wouldn't discard it.

Some BIOSes "distribute" the total boot order among several items. One of my computers BIOS has a general boot order (actually it's 3 seetings: "First Boot Device", "Second Boot Device" and "Third Boot Device") w/o the "Hard Disk" (= HDDs + SSDs + SSHDs + eMMCs + etc) in any of them although you can put it there, but you'd lose an item and this computer can boot from its floppy drive, optical drives and USB card reader (all internal) besides "Hard Disk", and another order for the HDs so called "Hard Disk Boot Priority".

If I had to do this operation myself, I would have done it this way (I did it so several times in 2022 when I mounted 2 computers and attended a defective HDD that I had to return, one Win7 and one Win10, although I'm not sure about having done it in Win10):

- Attach the new HDD to a regular SATA port (not eSATA, although I don't know any reason why it shouldn't work with eSATA). I connected just the cables with the case open and the new drive on the table, to save time.
- Copy the files.
- Detach the old SSHD and install the new HDD inside the case.

Months ago I replaced the data drive of a Windows 11 miniPC w/o issues, although both drives were external USB ones.

Over the course of troubleshooting my issue, there's been a situation where my boot drive (meaning the Samsung SSD with the Windows 10 installation) was the only storage drive attached to my motherboard via SATA cable. No external drive was attached to my PC. However, I ended getting error-message stuff that indicated that a bootable drive couldn't be found. The error-message stuff happened even though my boot drive was attached to my motherboard via SATA cable. No other storage drive was attached to my motherboard at the time.

It seems to me that back in 2017, Freddy1013 had the same basic problem that I've had as of late.

Maxirad said:

The error-message stuff happened even though my boot drive was attached to my motherboard via SATA cable. No other storage drive was attached to my motherboard at the time.

The error-message stuff is important to analyse the problem. Only a precise explanation can help to troubleshoot.
Try to boot into the Recovery Environment and if that is possible the BCD is mostly ok. You should know if the System was set up in BIOS or UEFI mode. Once that is clear you never (!) change that.
When you boot to Command Prompt type:
x:\Windows\System32> bcdedit
and post the result
When you find an entry: \Windows\system32\winload.efi it's an UEFI system
winload.exe indicates a BIOS system.

Pentagon said:

The error-message stuff is important to analyse the problem. Only a precise explanation can help to troubleshoot.
Try to boot into the Recovery Environment and if that is possible the BCD is mostly ok. You should know if the System was set up in BIOS or UEFI mode. Once that is clear you never (!) change that.
When you boot to Command Prompt type:
x:\Windows\System32> bcdedit
and post the result
When you find an entry: \Windows\system32\winload.efi it's an UEFI system
winload.exe indicates a BIOS system.

Pentagon, my system is a BIOS system. I found "winload.exe" but not "winload.efi" after I did the "bcdedit" command.

Interestingly, Windows Boot Manager is associated with the "D" partition instead of the "C" partition.

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joeandmarg0 said:

If your SSHD is still operational,then try cloning it to the HDD,staying with MBR.
I use Macrium Reflect and have not found any problems with cloning or imaging.

No offense, joeandmarg0, but Macrium Reflect Free isn't officially available anymore. Keep in mind that I'm on a fixed income.

Interestingly, Windows Boot Manager is associated with the "D" partition instead of the "C" partition.

Not necessarily an issue. Boot critical files should be on the partition marked Active. That can be the same partition as the os or a different partition.

post a screenshot of disk management window.

Attachment 408616

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SIW2 said:

Not necessarily an issue. Boot critical files should be on the partition marked Active. That can be the same partition as the os or a different partition.

post a screenshot of disk management window.

SIW2, here is the screenshot:

@Maxirad

In disk mgmt rt click C and mark it active

open an administrator cmd prompt and type:

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:
(then press enter)

Shutdown. Detach the other disk . Or go into bios and set your os disk first in bios boot order.