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#11
We're making progress. Thanks for all the help!
The boot partition was set as active.
I tried changing to AHCI first, by Navy's directions, but both drives only gave BSODs, and Repair did not help. However, safe mode with network worked flawlessly, and so did the next runs of Windows.
It actually fixed the detection problem of the HDD, but not the bootability, EasyBCD still did not give results.
Also, now both internal drives appeared as removable. Driver optimization settings were correct and Windows claimed that the driver is up to date (year 2006). ASRock had nothing better, so I took Intel's latest relevant drivers 11.2… and it solved the issue.
I now found that EasyBCD claims success even if it can't write the files, and so I re-did the small partition of the SSD, as FAT32. And finally I could make the SSD bootable.
So it all runs fine now.
I still did not do the EFI thing. Is it worth the hassle? Would it be a problem converting just the SSD?
Interestingly, while being both MBR, the BIOS did provide both AHCI and UEFI boot options for the SSD. I tried running the UEFI and it did run the 64bit Windows, but with no boot option for the HDD. I added an entry for the HDD using EasyBCD, but running it gave an error screen requiring fixing the HDD boot. At this point I ran out of time, and reverted the BIOS back to booting the AHCI SSD.