Precision 690 upgrade to SSD won't boot - Help Please

After properly cloned the drive, remove the original drive and put the cloned drive in its place.  

The original drive is connected to the set of connectors on the mother board marked HDD.  The new SSD is plugged into one of the SATA connectors on the mother board.  So - my WD Blue SATA drive will work just fine plugged into the HDD motherboard connector?

The Dell Precision 690 supports up to five hard drives (four SAS; four SATA; or four SAS and one SATA boot).  You just want to replace the current drive with a larger capacity (2TB) drive.  SATA to SATA, SAS to SAS, when both of HDD and SSD have the same connector, it should work with a simple swap.  Unless you used a U.2 SSD, then it won't work.

Note:  SATA drive can connect to and works with SAS ports but SAS drive does not work with SATA ports. 

Still Not Working:  I plugged the new SSD into the HDD0 connector where the old HDD had been working.  Rebooted, checked boot sequence - all looked fine so restarted and the BIOS loading got to where it said

Serial ATA AHCi Bios Ver  -  blah blah

Controller Bus #00, Dev #1F, Function #02: 00 ports

No device Found      AHCI Bios not installed.

Thats where the loading stopped.  I unplugged the SSD and plugged the old HHD back into the HDD0 spot, powered back up, and it booted up fine.  Thing is, I still got the same message about "No device found" and "AHCI BIOS not installed" but it loaded up Windows fine right after that message.  How do I fix this?  

The issue is highly possible with the cloning process.  Try  Macrium Reflect Free, you can get it here.  Just drag all (4) partitions to the new SSD and select OS partition to fill space, it will adjust to full capacity of new drive. 

Been there - Done that.  Used Macrium to do the clone.  Seemed to work fine, no problems.  The cloned drive showed up as the E drive when done - all files looked fine.  Only remember seeing (2) partitions on the old HDD though....   What now?

If you are familiar with Macrium cloning process, then you should know that a properly cloned drive should be able to boot without any issue.  If it has issue and can not boot, that meant the drive wasn't properly cloned.

To verify if the cloned drive has identical partitions structure as the original, you can check in Disk Management.  It will show you how many partition each drive has.

Cloning aside, from the error you received, it usually caused by storage controller driver.  To fix this type of issue, boot into Safe Mode to allow proper driver to be installed.  From Windows repair environment, select start up repair and after a Windows reboot, select option 4 to boot into Safe Mode.  A proper storage controller will be installed in the background.  After just a few seconds, select restart and machine should boot with normal mode.

On a side note, I was only able to tell you how thing works in general and without requesting all the detail technical info from your setup.  But you may want to look into the technical specs of your SAS controller as they do have limitation on drive capacity.

This was the first time I used the Macrium tool, and as I said - it appeared to work fine.  The partitions on the HDD were duplicated on the new SSD.  If the error I see while booting either the HDD or SSD (same error - "AHCI Bios not installed" was a problem, then why does the HDD boot up just fine?  It just skips over that error.  I have no idea how to " look into the technical specs of your SAS controller as they do have limitation on drive capacity."  Does Macrium or some other partition analysis software have the ability to look at the MBR on the SSD to see if something is wrong there?

There is a verification process and a report kept for cloning job.  Cloning or not, you should not see any error while booting with either drives.  If you see error at boot, it means that the BIOS settings was not correctly configured and conflicted with boot mode installed on drives. 

Maybe off topic but have you ever give your system a new coin cell battery so it won't lose the settings if it ever experiences power loss.

Refer to the user manual to understand your system better and having proper settings to match with your preference.  Assuming you have properly cloned the drive and it should be able to boot with one of the settings.

Let try with just new SSD connecting to SATA 0 and no other drive in your system.

Go to BIOS and set SATA mode to ATA and check to see if it will boot

If not, restart machine and change SATA mode to AHCI to see if it will boot.

If not, connecting SSD to SAS port HDD 0 and set as boot drive in BIOS to see if it will boot.

If all failed, you may consider to reset BIOS to default, connect new SSD to SAS port 0 and perform a clean install.  A new installation would take the least time comparing to days of troubleshooting to identify the issue.

You can always fall back to boot with original HDD again if new install still does not work.

I recently acquired this 690 at an auction - I don't know the history of it, but appeared to have not been used for 6 years or so.  The system BIOS memory battery was no good, so one of the first things I did was to put in a new battery.  Looks like there was a 2nd hard drive installed at one time (cables running to empty drive bay) that cable was going to HDD1.  I think  when I connected the new SSD to the SATA 0 that boot message about AHCI BIOS changed to saying that it was installed.  But that was when I was booting off the old HDD connected to HDD0.   I have tried booting from new SSD in SATA 0 with AHCI mode (no other HDD connected) and it will not proceed past the "AHCI BIOS not installed" message.  Have not tried booting with ATA mode yet.  Since the BIOS memory battery was dead for quite a while, BIOS should be running in the default mode.  I'll try a couple more things and let you know what I find.

When I made the clone using Macrium I made a rescue disk on a CD that was from the old HDD.  Since it has the ability to fix boot file problems, I wanted to see what the rescue program thought of the new SSD clone.  Disconnected the old HDD; connected the SSD to SATA 0.  Booted into BIOS setup to make sure SSD was showing up and enabled on SATA 0.  It was.  Also noticed that the boot message I sometimes see regarding unable to load AHCI BIOS  did not appear - it stated that AHCI BIOS did load.  Started up the restore program and see that Macrium shows the drive as E and F.  F being the system partition.  Does that need to show as drive C to load?  Maybe this is the boot problem?  I did not run the boot restore program yet.  Wanted to see what I should do about the drive not showing as C.  Sorry - I am not a PC guru... I know enough to be pretty dangerous, so I appreciate your help very much.

No - in this case, recently acquired does not mean that I'm not interested in the original C drive contents - I absolutely want to retain what is on there.  OK - so tried booting SSD from SATA 0 with the controller mode set to ATA instead of ACHI - Nope,  that produced worse results.

Finally got it to boot off the new SSD, so anyone else out there with this same problem... you will want to try this.  My new SSD drive is connected to SATA 0.  Booted the PC using the Macrium rescue CD that I made from the old HDD that was working fine in the HDD 0 slot.  On that rescue disk there is a selection to repair the boot files.  My SSD was showing windows 7 on the E partition and system files on F.  I had the program repair the system file partition.  It looks for several things and repairs in just a couple of seconds, but did not tell me what it found or changed.   Rebooted the PC and holy rat batman - loaded up REALLY FAST compared to the old HDD and is purring along just fine.  What a big difference that SSD makes.  Happy Camper here now!   Thanks for all your suggestions.