Can't select my SSD as a boot drive

[jdevenberg]

I just got a Samsung 830 256 GB SSD (got it for $75 from someone who bought it and never even opened it). I successfully cloned my 1 TB drive that my G75VX shipped with. Windows sees the SSD, my Bios sees the SSD under the advanced tab's SATA option, but I cannot select it as a boot drive, the only boot option I have in my bios boot tab is the 1TB Seagate drive the laptop shipped with. I have read many of the SSD threads on this forum and Googled until my Googler hurt and I cannot find a resolution to this issue. I have had the laptop for 3 months and have a large number of games on it so really don't particularly want to do a clean install, but I can if I must. I have a backup I made yesterday on an external Seagate hard drive I have (I made the backup with the Seagate Dashboard, let me know if I need to use something else). Thanks for any help.

[rewben]

can you boot it up with your ssd only? (take out the stock hdd)

[jdevenberg]

No I cannot

[GottiBoi55]

Sounds like "Boot manager" corruption!

[jdevenberg]

I got the BIOS to let me select the SSD. We have a separate 300 MB system partition I also had to clone. Now When I try to boot, I get the error that winload.efi is missing or contains errors.

[GottiBoi55]

When cloning to the SSD did you format drive, or did you leave all "unallocated?
Looks like there's no UEFI (EFI) boot in place, Windows 8 / 8.1 needs to be GPT/UEFI to work correctly!

[jdevenberg]

I formated it and chose GPT, not MBR.

[GottiBoi55]

jdevenberg wrote:
I formated it and chose GPT, not MBR.

You need to delete all partitions, and leave the whole drive unallocated, let the "clone software" partition the drive.(GPT)
(Has something to do with resizing all partitions correctly, mainly the EFI System partition need to be correct)

[jdevenberg]

Okay. I am retrying to clone it again. I am still having to clone partition by partition due to the size difference between the drives I won't be cloning over the recovery partitions to the SSD, but I am not creating partitions first.

[GottiBoi55]

jdevenberg wrote:
Okay. I am retrying to clone it again. I am still having to clone partition by partition due to the size difference between the drives I won't be cloning over the recovery partitions to the SSD, but I am not creating partitions first.

Good, just let the cloning software do the partitioning of the SSD.

PS: Then try booting with just the SSD as rewben pointed out.