I recently tried swapping hard drives between two Dell P75001 laptops—one that's barely used and another that's seen better days. The older model runs fine with its original SSD, but when I tried to boot the newer unit with the SSD from my mom's laptop, it fails to start. I checked the BIOS for admin passwords and didn't find any issues. Initially, I had no problems swapping the drives physically. However, when I powered on the new unit with my mom's SSD, I got a load error after a memory test. It then redirected me to SecureBoot, and the laptop shut down almost instantly. I've checked the connections, and even after multiple attempts, I still faced a 'no bootable media found' error with her SSD. When I returned the original hard drive to its laptop, it booted up perfectly fine. Clearly, there's something in the configuration stopping the second unit from recognizing her SSD. Any thoughts on how to resolve this?
3 Answers
It sounds like you might be hitting a UEFI vs. legacy boot mode issue. The newer laptops generally require the drives to be set up with GPT if you're using UEFI. When both hard drives are installed, try running an admin command prompt and use 'diskpart', then 'list disk' to check the partition style. If you see an asterisk under the GPT column, that unit needs to boot in UEFI mode. If there's nothing there, then it should be set to legacy. Adjusting this in the BIOS could solve your issue!
Honestly, it's a bit of a puzzle why the SSD works in its original laptop but not in the other one. If you have already checked the BIOS settings for TPM and Secure Boot, and turned both on and off, you might want to look into ensuring that the Windows environment on the SSD doesn’t have hardware restrictions from the previous system.
What operating system are both laptops running? And do you have any drive encryption set up? If there's Intel PTT enabled on the new laptop, try disabling Secure Boot and see if that helps. Sometimes, TPM settings can complicate matters when switching drives.
Just to clarify, are both your machines set to UEFI? That can mess things up too.