Question Laptop refuses to boot from SDD caddy

Apr 13, 2026
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Hi!

I have HDD (SATA-II) in the original hard disk bay with Windows 11/Ubuntu installed so they dual-boot fine via GRUB.
I have SDD (SATA-III) in the caddy with Windows 11 installed by cloning the Windows 11 and UEFI partitions from HDD.

UEFI detects the SDD but if I select it in the UEFI menu, UEFI automatically boots from HDD instead, thus I am greeted with GRUB.
If I find the needed .efi file in SDD manually from UEFI menu "Boot from EFI", I am getting error "Selected EFI application image is not valid".

How to make SDD bootable via caddy? If I had SDD installed in the original hard disk bay, I was able to boot to SDD by manually selecting the .efi file but Windows 11 on SDD did not detect HDD in caddy.

Furthermore, I needed a few reboots before Windows 11 on HDD/UEFI detected SDD in the caddy.