Issue using a "used" SSD as a Windows 8.1 Boot Drive
- by EpiGrad
So, I'm something of a Mac person, but decided to take a stab at this whole "build yourself a PC" thing - right now, the thing is assembled, posts just fine, and can get to the BIOS. The problem is the drive I want to use - I intended to use a 80 GB Corsair SSD I've had sitting around as the boot drive, and a new Samsung SSD for games and the like.
So I boot using a Windows 8.1 install USB stick, and if the Samsung drive is plugged in, it happily offers to install Windows on it. The Corsair drive though, it's flipped out - I reformatted it as a blank NTFS drive (it was HFS for Mac purposes) and the BIOS can't see it, nor can the Windows installer.
What's wrong, and how do I fix it? The tools at my disposal are:
The current ASUS BIOS that came with my motherboard (a Z87I-Deluxe), a Mac running the latest OS X which can also boot to Windows 7 if needed via either Parallels or Bootcamp.
Update 1: Update: Based on a friend's suggestion to switch SATA ports, Windows 8.1's installer can now see the drive as Drive 0, Partition 1, a 83.8 GB "Primary" partition. But when I click it and hit "Next", I get the following error:
"We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information, see the Setup log files" - not that it gives any clue how to access those.
Update 2: Following a trail of Google suggestions, I ended up going into advanced tools and just reformatting the drive as follows:
Start DISKPART.
Type LIST DISK and identify your SSD disk number (from 0 to n disks).
Type SELECT DISK <n> where <n> is your SSD disk number.
Type CLEAN
Type CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
Type ACTIVE
Type FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK
Type ASSIGN
Type EXIT twice (one to get out of DiskPart, the other to exit the command line tool)
Per these instructions. This goes well enough, but now I can select the disk for installation, and I get a new error: "Windows 8 cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GP disks."
So, Googling that, I do the following:
select disk 0
clean
convert gpt
exit
...and we might have fixed it. Windows is at least trying to install now.
