UEFI won't recognize 840 Pro as an optional boot device

[Jeff7181]

I have a Lenovo Ideapad Y500 computer. A long time ago I replaced the 1TB spinny disk with an SSD (840 Pro) and used a TechNet license for Windows. Now that TechNet is no more, I'd like to reuse the existing Windows license that came with the computer to reinstall Windows and possibly upgrade to Windows 10.

For whatever reason, no matter how I try to install Windows 8 or with what edition, the product key won't work (it's embedded in the BIOS, but I retrieved it using ProduKey).

So I've been trying to create a restore disk from the original hard drive, which I still have and it still boots fine. I can create a restore disk, but I can't restore to the SSD because the drive doesn't appear bootable when using UEFI instead of Legacy BIOS so when the restore runs it says it's missing a partition and even if I create one it won't work.

Any ideas how I can get the 840 Pro to be recognized when using UEFI rather than the Legacy BIOS?

 

[JeffMD]

Getting things to boot in uefi, easy. Getting things to boot in secure boot... f-that. After hours of trying to get an old windows restore to do just that I ended up using the microsoft windows 8 restore creation tool (much like the windows 10 one) as it created a signed usb stick for secure boot.

 

[Jeff7181]

I actually figured out my issue. The main problem was that when I installed the SSD I switched it from UEFI to Legacy mode for some reason - I think because I didn't understand UEFI at all at the time. So none of my restores would work because they were looking for UEFI partitions to perform the restore. I gave up on the restore and just switched back to UEFI, deleted all partitions on the drive and ran a standard 8.1 install, which was able to retrieve the embedded product key that it hadn't been able to do in the past because I had switched it to Legacy mode.

 

[tweakboy]

Go to BIOS fix it there, childs play!

 

[tweakboy]

Nice Jeff, great going!