Help - Brand new P35K-CF1, moved hard drive to another bay immediately

I must have missed something or maybe I'm just dumb, but I got my P35K-CF1, and was surprised that there was no OEM recovery disc that I would have though would have the operating system. Maybe it's because times have changed and I just haven't bought a new laptop since 2008. Anyway, obviously, the recovery is partitioned onto the stock hard drive. Fine. So, I booted the laptop just to check bios, screen, power, recovery options, etc, but I didn't do the windows setup. Instead, I turned it back off, opened it up, and I installed an SSD in the bay where the stock hard drive was, and moved the stock hard drive to the hot swappable bay, thinking either the bios will still find the OS or I can change the drive order in the bios to check the drive in that bay first.

Looks like this isn't the case. If I just let it boot, I get "Preparing automatic repair" at the gigabyte splash screen on the bottom under the gigabyte logo, and then it goes to Choose Your Keyboard Layout, and then gives me two options: "Troubleshoot" or "Turn off your PC". Under troubleshoot, choosing "Refresh PC" tells me that "the drive where windows is installed is locked". Under "Reset your PC", I get "unable to reset your PC, a required drive partition is missing". Under "Advanced Options", both "System Restore" and "System Image Recovery" give me low level gray-box error codes that say things like "file missing". "Attempt to Repair" results in the gigabyte spash screen with "attempting repairs" at the bottom, and it just sits like that forever. Pressing F9 after a fresh reboot at the splash screen brings me to the System Recovery, but just like above, there are only those two options, Troubleshoot or Turn Off.

Am I missing something in the BIOS? Am I going to have to swap the drives back?

 

Did your CF1 come with any msata disks?

I think the recovery partition must be in a particular position to work.

Clone the disk to your new disk and try again.

 

No, the CF1 comes with only one hard drive, mechanical at the 2.5" internal bay. That's really a dumb oversight on Gigabyte's part:

If I want to put the SSD into that internal bay, which I do, I have to choose the less worse of these two choices:
1) Clone the recovery partition onto the SSD, resulting in loss of storage space where it is already at a premium, not to mention the recovery doesn't exactly benefit from the performance an SSD provides.
2) Keep the recovery partition on the original disk or another disk, and have to swap it back into that internal 2.5" bay whenever I want to use it.

 

You could always install windows on the original HD - then clone the windoes partition to the new disk (you'll have to goof around with the MBR).

or

Clone the original HD to the SSD, install windows, remove the recovery partition, resize the disk.

 

Yeah I have no problem getting the OS where I want it (onto the SSD), but I'm pointing out that the F9 - System Restore function in the BIOS relies on the Recovery Partition being located in that internal bay. So if I want to put an SSD in that internal bay, and if I still want to use that Recovery Partition in the future, I either have to store it on the SSD (by cloning it) which wastes space on the SSD, or I have to swap a drive that has the Recovery Partition into that bay whenever I want to use the Recovery Partition. What I can't do is load the Recovery Partition from any of the other 3 bays. That's really frustrating.

 

I doubt there is a way around this but I don't think it is a major issue. I just installed Windows 8.1 from an ISO and used the existing key that is programmed into the bios. Before the OEM keys were on a sticker but now they are located in firmware.
To be clear, I installed Windows 8.1 from an updated ISO and during install I used the default key Microsoft gives for the trial. Then after install you can grab your OEM key from the firmware and activate the new clean installed Windows 8.1. You will lose the recovery partition but when you can reinstall with up-to-date ISOs from Microsoft then I don't think it is a problem.

Check out mydigitallife forums for more info.