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I have a Samsung 850 EVO with Windows 10 installed and a new, blank Samsung 960 EVO. I'd like to move Windows to the 960 since it's faster. Then I can wipe the 850 and use it as extra storage.

I installed the blank 960 in my system and booted into Windows, which is on the 850. Using Samsung's Data Migration Tool, which can be found on this page, I successfully cloned all of my data from the 850 to the 960.

No problems so far, but here's where I encounter an issue: If the 850 is unplugged, I can boot into Windows just fine on the 960. If both drives are plugged in, I can't boot with the 960.

If I boot with both drives plugged in and go into the BIOS to select the 960 as first in the boot order, the options are: enter image description here

If I select Samsung SSD 960 EVO 500GB as the first option and leave the 850 enabled for the second and third options (not sure why it appears in the list twice), the system thinks about booting with the 960 for a few seconds, a few underscores or dashes flicker, and then the system successfully boots with the 850. When this happens, the 960 is inaccessible: enter image description here

If I disable the 850, the same underscores or dashes flicker, but then I'm returned to the BIOS.

When I boot with only the 960 plugged in, I get these options, and the system boots perfectly, just without the 850.enter image description here

I need to be able to boot into the OS with the 960 while the 850 is plugged in so that I can wipe the 850, but this isn't working. I also tried booting with just the 960 and then hot plugging the 850, but the 850 didn't show up at all in Disk Management.

The motherboard is an ASUS PRIME Z370-A with BIOS version 0607 x64.

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    Disk Management's "rescan disks" should work after hotplugging. Alternatively use the Windows install USB's "command line" to repartition...
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Feb 25, 2018 at 9:31
  • @grawity You put me on the right path, and I got it figured out. Thanks!
    – user623763
    Commented Feb 25, 2018 at 17:35
  • You can either wipe the source disk or change its disk identifier. See here for more details superuser.com/a/1777928/111930
    – bernie
    Commented Apr 7, 2023 at 16:16

2 Answers 2

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Enabling Hot Plugging

Per @grawity's comment, I tried the rescan disks option, which didn't do work initially. This lead me to research my motherboard further, and I found that hot plugging has to be enabled on a per-port basis in the BIOS and is disabled on all SATA ports by default. I enabled hot plugging, booted with just the 960 plugged in, and then I plugged in the 850. It was recognized immediately.

Wiping the disk

To wipe the disk, I opened Disk Management, right clicked Disk 1 (the 850), and clicked Online to bypass the Offline (The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online) error. Some of the partitions were difficult to delete, so I just deleted all partitions by following these steps from this Lifewire article:

  1. Open Command Prompt and type:
  2. diskpart
  3. list disk
  4. select disk 1
  5. list partition
  6. select partition 1
  7. delete partition override
  8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for partitions 2, 3, and 4 on Disk 1
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You cloned the disk, it means all data cloned. The EFI boot requires unique identifiers, but this is same on both drive. You can change it from diskpart, then boot manager will recognize both drives.

Boot from 850 Run diskpart:

list disk

this displays the disks

select disk X

where is X the 960 drive number

uniqueid disk

this will show you the id, like "5f1b2c36" or "baf784e7-6bbd-4cfb-aaac-e86c96e166ee"

uniqueid disk id=5f1b2c37

This change the disk id to 5f1b2c37 instead 5f1b2c36. ID must be same format as you got before, just change a digit to something else.

Also you can reset the boot menu from BIOS, then motherboard rebuild the boot list.

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