SSDs have prevailed over traditional hard drives or HDDs due to their transfer speeds. SATA SSDs typically offer at least 8x the transfer speeds of an HDD. This difference skyrockets compared to M.2 PCIe SSDs, which can offer transfer speeds 100 times faster than an HDD.
These differences in transfer speeds translate into substantial performance improvements. The operating system loads in much less time, the execution of applications is more fluid or games reduce loading times significantly.
If you have installed an SSD in your computer and the computer does not start, it could be for two reasons. We are going to explain these cases to you and what processes you must carry out.
Does not start after installing the SSD
We have purchased an SSD and have connected it to our computer. We keep the old HDD with Windows installed. Now we find that it does not start, it tells us that there is no operating system installed.
The motherboard has detected the SSD drive and takes it as the main one in the system, but it does not have Windows. That it detects it like this may be because we have connected it to a SATA 2 port and the HDD is in a SATA 3 port, this makes it detect that the SSD is “more important” so to speak.
We are interested in installing Windows on the SSD to obtain the best performance. To do this you should have a USB memory to install Windows, something you should have done prior to the SSD installation process.
Now, you need to enter the BIOS to modify the boot drives. To access it we must press F2 or DEL, and then follow these steps:
- We go to the “Startup” or “Boot” tab
- We must look for “Boot Option” or “Boot Order” which sets the boot priority. We have to go to the one indicated as “#1”.
- A menu opens and we must choose the SSD drive.
- Once ready, we must save the changes and restart, which will appear at the end of the options menu.
Once it reboots, the option to install the operating system on the SSD should appear.
We install Windows on the SSD and it stops working
Let’s assume that we have connected the new SSD and installed Windows on it. We don’t want to throw away the old HDD and we have uninstalled the operating system, come on, we have formatted it and left it clean. This is a great option, since we can use it to store files.
But, now we encounter the situation that the computer does not start the operating system. It enters a kind of reboot loop or tells us on the screen that the hard drive does not have an operating system installed. We must perform the following actions.
Check the SSD from the BIOS
We have disconnected the HDD to connect the SSD and install the operating system. Once the process is done, reconnect the HDD, but suddenly the system no longer starts. The SSD port may have been disconnected while giving priority to the HDD.
We must verify that the motherboard is detecting the SSD drive. To do this, during the boot process we must press the F2 or DEL keys to access the BIOS. Once inside we must see if the SSD does indeed appear in the storage unit area.
If it does not appear, the first thing we must do is turn off the computer and change the SSD port, specifically to SATA port 1. We must do this because some SATA connectors are disabled as they are considered secondary. It’s not very common, but it can happen.
Boot order of storage drives
The BIOS detects both the HDD and SSD, but there is no way to boot into Windows anyway. Here we have the problem that the motherboard is wanting to boot Windows from the formatted HDD. This is normal, since the motherboard recognizes the drive and knew to boot from it.
We have to change the system boot drive in the BIOS. We will press F2 or DEL to access the BIOS and then follow these steps:
- We go to the “Startup” or “Boot” tab
- We must look for “Boot Option” or “Boot Order” which sets the boot priority. We have to go to the one indicated as “#1”.
- A menu opens and we must choose the SSD drive.
- Once ready, we must save the changes and restart, which will appear at the end of the options menu.
This changes the settings and states that the SSD is the primary drive and should always boot from here. If we have several operating systems on several hard drives, on most motherboards by pressing F11 (it may vary depending on the manufacturer) we can access the “Boot Menu”. This is a simple menu that allows you to choose each time the storage unit from which you want to boot.