1-1 Clone of Win8.1 HDD didnt work (prep for win10 upgrade)  

So my dad did some of his research on gaming oriented hard drives, and he got interested with firecuda desktop drives, so I bought him a 2 TB Firecuda Desktop Drive and it came in today (yes I know there are better ones, but he's adamant on firecuda, and im not touching that issue with any pole/stick). I also got him a new amd rx570 card, and I wanted to do this to later on upgrade him to windows 10 so he could use said card effectively. His current desktop drive is a seagate barracuda model ST2000DM001-1ER164. Also, don't know if so, but I think his current desktop drive might be failing, so that's part of the reason I want to get him on a new HDD

I updated his win 8.1 with the updates it needed, and installed macrium reflect afterwards; then I took a look and saw he had an ssd that had some space on it being used; opening up the disk management console, it shows his SSD being used as the boot drive to boot into windows 8.1 (I didn't know it was done that way, but if it works, im not messing with it), so just in-case I used macrium reflect and made image files of his SSD and his C: drive onto a spare 1 TB HDD with a powered hot-swap HDD dock I bought ages ago

Then I used macrium reflect, to clone his C: drive onto his new firecuda drive, and expected that to work after I switched the desktop drive with the firecuda, but after I booted it up, it went to this persistent error screen about "something something windows/system32/winload.exe cant boot, either press this button to retry or press F8 to change startup settings" or something along the lines, but no matter what I tried, it just wouldn't switch out of that error screen, needing a forced shutdown. I switched the firecuda with his other hard drive and it booted into his windows 8.1 just fine, but I don't know why it wouldnt boot into the cloned hard drive just as it would with his old barracuda. Could it be the sharp difference between his current barracuda and his firecuda, or something else im missing; any help is appreciated

Boot from the Macrium Reflect Rescue Drive and under the restore menu run the Fix Windows Boot Problems utility.

ill try that when my father isnt too awake; had an accident (fell), got one HFIL of a bruise on his side, luckly nothing else resulting from it besides pain that is kicking his butt right now

I would for him, just like how my brother has that kind of setup, and like how im moving my setup onto an SSD/HDD combo, but the setup he has will be fine for now, until I either convince him to move to an SSD/HDD setup, or he gets a new computer with an SSD/HDD setup, or a double SSD setup (one SSD for the OS, the 2nd one for the rest of the computer files)

in the end, money is a bit tight for him to splurge on a new computer (either pre-built from Dell/other vendors, or using pcpartpicker and making one ourselves)

Look, when the time comes that he wants to look for faster bootup times via the SSD holding the OS isntead of an HDD/SSHD, then by all means, ill go for the samsung SSD choices you shown, but for now the firecuda drive will suffice

also, I ran the fix boot problems util in the macrium reflect rescue media (after I made another rescue media using the reflect program installed on his computer (for compatibility concerns, warranted or not), it showed the windows 8.1 OS on his C: drive, then his SSD as the boot media, and to my surprise, it worked perfectly, booted up to his OS just fine

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and its not that he can't afford an SSD (either the mSATA, the regular 2.5" laptop sized ones, or the nvme ones), but last I approached him with something like this, he shut me down hard, saying stuff that mostly revolved around saving money for what's truly needed (paying bills, groceries, etc...).