HP ENVY m6 sleekbook mSATA as OS and SATA SSD as secondary

Ok. For starters, I have friend who has a HP Envy m6. Model m6-k125dx to be precise, but the point of this post may help with MANY OTHER LAPTOPS.


So, his hdd died. I talked him into some upgrades. Talked him into some RAM, a 1TB Seagate SATA III SSD, and a jazzy Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA.


I had installed the mSATA and left the 1TB disconnected( this was me actually forgetting to, this is was not planned). I used the recovery usb sent by HP. It kinda took a bit, but it was successful. I started installing other software, when I realized I forgot the bigger drive. So shut her down, flipped her over, and gave her the solid.( Yah, I'm a little eccentric about computers.)


To my surprise, when i turned it back on, it wouldn't detect the OS. So I started doing research, noticing a lot of other people scratching their heads. I agreed with the other forums, it seems like the machine is reading the SATA III first, and not even caring about the extra storage hanging out in that mSATA port. Someone has suggested installing Plop, a boot loader. I'm not to savvy, nor impressed, by Linux and the like solutions, plus it sounded like a lot of leg work to just get the boot files to run, but this idea got me to better learn about EFI and UEFI boots. And I found some success.


So, what also got me looking at the EFI tech was actually a weird coincidence. When I booted the machine with both drives connected, and NO USB Connected, it would present me with NO options when going to the BIOS Boot Select Screen, not the actual BIOS, but that quick little menu you can hit during startup. But when i had the Recovery USB connected, it gave me two options, USB and EFI file. So I selected the EFI, which is presented much like a hive or file system tree. I actually wiggled my way to using some "en-US" option, which fired up the installed OS on the mSATA.


But I don't want to have to teach my buddy to do this little thing every start up, for starters cus its inconvenient, and also cause it would make me look bad as a techie. So, I did some reading about EFI, and decided, "Well, if its looking at the SATA for a EFI boot file, maybe we can put one there and have it boot the OS on the other drive. I thought i would have to do a lot of messing around, but I started by shrinking the volume on the SATA III to leave a 1 gig of unallocated space. I then used MiniTool Partition Wizard to copy the EFI partition to the unallocated space. To my surprise, I can restart this thing with no problems. No editing the EFI or any other weird workarounds.


I hope this rant helps others in the future, not just specifically with this model, but other ones.


Other thoughts on the subject...


I feel I was lucky to be able to boot to the OS via the boot selection windows while having the usb plugged in, but if others instead to repeat my steps, get one of those USB Adapters to wire the second drive while booted into the first. If you don't own one of those adapters, get one, they can do fun stuff. I've repaired a Playstation3 with that and a really poopy desktop that probably didn't even support usb 2.0.


Second, think outside your norms. I didn't watch the release of some technologies so closely, and I had no idea I could use a "MBR"(I still look at it that way) to hit an OS on another drive. I played around. This time, I was successful.