Question Old X58 system with WD blue 250GB SATA SSD problems

[Whymeintrouble2]

Good day everyone,
I'm trying to help my uncle out and give him a computer he can actually use. He got severely taken advantage of by a computer shop near where he lives. From all the testing I've done with his computer, the motherboard had severe problems. DOA. So I'm going to give him my old system, an Intel 920, gigabyte x58 motherboard 6gb ram. I'm trying to just toss his old ssd, the above mentioned WD Blue 250GB SATA SSD, into the setup and let him have at it. But every time i go to boot up it recognize that the drive is there but it's like it doesn't want to boot from it. It says nothing about can't find the drive or there is something wrong, it just stays there acting like it will do something. It's not locked up, Because i can restart via ctrl-alt-delete. I made sure the drive was visible in the bios. So I swapped drives with a known working one. That one booted fine, so I grabbed my external drive caddy, hooked it up to one of my other computers, and the WD can be read. So, i pulled the ssd on that computer and plugged in the WD and it just stays in the I'm not working state.
So..... What does everyone think this is? I get no errors after it checks for boot from cd drives, the cursor just sits there, blinking, taunting me, laughing at me.
Thanks for any help everyone
PS. I own a sledge hammer 😁

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Have you checked what the drives partition scheme is? A system that old has a legacy BIOS, so will only boot from MBR, not GPT.

You can try cleaning the disk with diskpart, so getting rid of everything on the drive. That should do the trick. To do this you'll either need to connect the drive to another system, or do it while booting from a flash drive (or even DVD). I'll happy explain if you need more directions.

I do not think the sledgehammer will be needed just yet...

 

[Whymeintrouble2]

Have you checked what the drives partition scheme is? A system that old has a legacy BIOS, so will only boot from MBR, not GPT.

It came from a 1155 based system, and i would doubt that it would be anything but MBR, but I'll check after i get off work tomorrow. Thanks for the help!

 

[Arkaign]

Hey just as a note, on a lot of those old X58 era boards, they had two SATA controllers to live up to 'HEDT' style, often 6+4 or 6+2 etc. And choosing the right boot order in bios is more involved than Flash>Optical>HDD.

Easiest way is to look at the Mobo and see if there are different color SATA ports on there. If there are, swap the SSD to the other color. Practical performance won't be appreciably different either way between them, especially if someone isn't copying files from one SSD to the other and back again all day.

 

[Shmee]

It came from a 1155 based system, and i would doubt that it would be anything but MBR, but I'll check after i get off work tomorrow. Thanks for the help!

What Windows version is on the drive? A lot of 1155 motherboards did support UEFI install. May depend on the chipset or individual board though. Anyway, this sounds like it may be the issue, that the drive is GPT, and the motherboard cannot boot it. Another thing to try, is make sure the SATA controller is in AHCI mode. And as mentioned above, mind which controller it is on if there are more than one.

 

[blckgrffn]

Commenting because I love the sledgehammer bit

Did you ever activate W10 on this board? I ask because at this point I would just do a fresh install. If you don't choose a key during install but the board was activated at some point it will use the board signature to magically activate W10 with a digital license.

Lol, I bought a motherboard used recently and I threw W10 on there just to test it and it magically activated W10 Home

Booting and installing fresh from an USB drive is like a 30 minute exercise I bet with this hardware.

If you have bunch of legacy files on there... well... I'd just clone the drive onto something else first so he can get at the files and then still used the drive. Maybe. Lots of variables there. I happen to have a stack of old laptop hard drives 320GB-500GB that would be exactly what I would use in this case.