Hey guys, so for black friday I bought my first SSD. I have a 1 TB HDD in my system currently running everything including windows 8.1, my games, and some pictures and video. The HDD is not partitioned at all. I have tried to clean install Windows to the SSD but after doing so I don't have the option to boot from it. Is there a way to get Windows to boot from the SSD while keeping my storage on the HDD and not wiping it? I would like to not redownload 500 GBs of games. And after I figure this out, what should I keep on the SSD besides Windows? it's only 120 GBs so its not much, but I was thinking just Google Chrome and Steam (minus the games). Thanks for your help!
Unplug your hard drive and try installing Windows on the ssd. After installing and getting updates, power off your rig and hook your hard drive back up and boot a Linux live CD/usb and use gparted to remove the "bootable" flag from the partition(s) on the hard drive. Restart your computer, remove your Linux media, and carry on.
Have you changed the boot options in the BIOS
to billgatez and nexx: I installed windows without the HDD plugged in. When I plugged it back in the SSD dissapeared from the boot menu as an option. I also am completely unfamiliar with linux.
Check your BIOS settings! I don't know what BIOS kind of thing you got going since it could be EUFI! But I'm fairly confident you have your boot devices messed up in the list of bootable drives. Make sure your SSD is first on that list or at least listed before your HDD when they are both connected.
I'd also warn you that when working with SATA, you should completely power down the system when dealing with boot drives before trying to boot from them. Other than the obvious, the reason is because the BIOS (POST) needs to detect what drives it can boot from and then look at them in order of priority that you should have preset in those BIOS/EUFI settings.
Lastly, I don't know what you mean when you say your HDD is not partitioned at all but then go on to say that it boots -- that's just not possible in a Windows world. Every partition should be set and only one of them (per physical drive) should be marked "active" for any booting. Yes, it is possible to have several partitions and none of them marked active but that's not what you have said when you say you can get something to boot. Therefore, I suspect you have cloned your HDD to your SSD and are now having GUID conflicts (it's a Windows thing where if there are 2 physical drives with exactly the same GUID one of them will not be visible). So if you have done something like clone your HDD to the SSD then you will need to completely erase one of them and reformat in order to use them both. (It's just one more reason to have elected to do a complete new installation on a totally blank -- unpartitioned -- SSD).