Solved! cloned SSD not recognized in bios in optical drive slot in caddy but once booted from old HDD recognized in device manager.

[live_neutral_ground]

I have cloned my brand new WD green SSD as I have successfully done before by connecting it with a caddy to the optical drive bay, it get's recognized, formatted and cloned.

Then replacing the old HDD with this new SSD in the "main" SATA port with nothing else connected and it boots perfectly.

Then I plug the SSD into the optical drive bay with the caddy and keep the old HDD disconnected and it is not recognized in bios and is unable to boot.
AHCI enabled, secure boot disabled. I have an Acer Aspire ZC-610. BIOS P11 A1 which upon research is the latest version.

I can't simply swap the drives as the old HDD is a 3.5" and will not fit, also swapping the ports/cables is not an option either as they do not reach. but if done so the PC boots via the SSD in the "main" port and the HDD connected as secondary. When booting from the SSD in the main port and the old HDD in the optical port (when the cables are swopped) it boots fine and I can see both drives in device manager.

Is there another solution using diskpart or 3rd party software?

https://imgur.com/a/AyNbHSS

View: https/imgur.com/a/AyNbHSS

 

[raykneale]

Looks like you may be missing a system reserved partition on your ssd ,this will contain the bootable info required to boot from the ssd. If this is the case you can create a small partition say 500mb on the ssd making sure it shows as unallocated space and then clone the boot partition from your hdd to the newly created partition on your ssd.I hope this makes sense because its a long time since I cloned my hdd ,I made the mistake of not selecting the correct WINpe environment when trying to use the cloning software.