Tried installing and booting from new drive...now it won't load correctly...

[A-Mac]

Hi folks,

So I've encountered a pretty bad problem. When switched on my laptop has a black screen with the mouse cursor up, constantly flickering between the load circle symbol of windows. The only thing I can do is press F2 and enter the BIOS but even restoring defaults here it doesn't seem to boot properly again.

This comes after installing my new Samsung 970Evo plus SSD and trying to boot from it having cloned my current HDD drive over. It wasn't showing up in my bios to boot from at any point and since changing some settings in the bios it now doesn't get past that black screen with the cursor, even when I restore defaults in the BIOS. Is there any advice on what to do next? And if possible an understanding of why I haven't been able to find and boot from my new m.2 drive. Every YouTube video/website I've tried different ways and it hasn't seemed to have worked, it never shows up!

Thanks,

Andy

 

[SpyderTracks]

What version of windows is it?

 

[A-Mac]

Apologies, it's windows 10

This is the laptop spec

 

[SpyderTracks]

And what did you use to clone the old drive?

 

[A-Mac]

Originally Samsung magician and data migration. Then also tried it with EaseUS Todo backup. Both cloned the data the same but it still didn't show as a bootable drive in bios.

I've left my laptop on the black screen with the cursor for over 2 hours this time and something still hasn't happened. I can access the BIOS when I reboot it, but that's all.

 

[ubuysa]

Do you also have the HDD with Windows on it installed in the system?

If you boot the Windows install media and use Repair My Computer can you see the SSD? If you can try using Startup Repair and see whether that helps.

 

[A-Mac]

Yeah the HDD has windows on it and installed. Don't know if it's worth removing the SSD and trying to start it up as normal again? Not sure if it's struggling to find the start up. I'm not entirely sure how to boot the install windows media...the only screen I can get to is the BIOS.

Loading up normally just has the black screen with the mouse cursor loading for ages. I left it for 3 hours and it stayed on that the whole time.

 

[Rakk]

Loading up normally just has the black screen with the mouse cursor loading for ages. I left it for 3 hours and it stayed on that the whole time.

From what I've seen before that means it trying to boot from somewhere that it can't boot from, you may need to check your boot order to make sure its not trying to boot on the wrong hard drive or device (I had that problem once after I replaced my boot drive with a new ssd and it was then trying to boot from an external harddrive that was connected which funnily enough did not work, so changing the boot order fixed it).

So you may want to check an see what is set in the boot priority list in the BIOS incase its trying to boot form something its not be to be booting from

To boot the installable media you just need to set said usb device to the first spot in the boot priority list (obviously it must be plugged in at the time)

 

[A-Mac]

Appreciate the help. Unfortunately none of these things worked, so I've decided to send it back to PC specialist and see if they can sort it out. Hopefully shoe whether my silver warranty package was worth it or not! 😅

 

[ubuysa]

I would first remove the original HDD that still has Windows on it so that the only bootable drive in there is the new SSD. It's possible the original drive being bootable is the problem....