Can't boot on new WD BLUE SSD

I own a Aspire TC-885-EB17 that I use primarely to play FS2020 and XPlane11.
Though it has an Intel I5 processor, with 12 Gig memory, Booting was sluggish. It has a WD HDD.
I just purchased a new laptop equipped with an SSD, and it is booting at lightning speed. So I decided, in the Aspire, to replace my HDD with a 500 Gig WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD.
I made an image of my HDD to an external drive, looked many Youtube videos on cloning and replacing drives, and started the operation, confident that it would be pretty simple and safe.
But…
NO ONE mentionned the Windows Booting Manager ! My BIOS doesn’t allow to point to specific boot drive.
After hours of painfull ACRONIS cloning, re-cloning, usage of ACRONIS repair USB, trying different combinations in BIOS, disconnecting and reconnecting HDD, the desktop never booted on the SSD. SSD always showed up as E:
To make a long story (looks like it is too late anyway!) short, I created a WIndows recovery USB stick, disconnected the HDD, restarted using Windows boot menu to point to USB, and Windows automatically renamed the SSD as C: .
No videos, WEB forums, etc, mentionned these steps.
Restarted and it is now booting off the SSD. Reconnected the HDD, wich now showing up as E: .
And , of course, the desktop now boots in a snap !

Dang I would have removed the old HDD, installed the new SSD. Then a nice clean fresh install of Windows from a USB stick.

But you could have cloned the existing HDD to the new SSD connected on USB adapter or another SATA port. Then shutdown and remove the old HDD and installed the new SSD on the SATA port the HDD was on. If all went well and it ran OK on the cloned drive you could just format the old HDD and put it back in the PC for storage or what ever.

I just don’t like to clone to a new drive because any issues you MIGHT have and not know of may just rear their ugly heads and ruin your day :slight_smile: But that’s just me…