# HDD & SSD are legacy devices?



## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

I was servicing an HP laptop (Envy 17 model) that suffered hard drive failure. I replaced the hard drive with an SSD and loaded Windows 10 without incident.

While loading drivers I noticed that there was a newer BIOS version available. It seemed like a good thing to upgrade the BIOS, so it did it. The BIOS flashing utility ran without incident, then the system rebooted itself.

When the system restarted I got a BIOS error, "boot device not found." I took a look at the boot order, but there was no internal hard drive in the list. However, it existed in the "legacy device" list, but legacy devices were disabled by default. I enabled legacy devices and it booted to the SSD without a problem.

It just seems strange to me that HDD & SSD devices would be considered legacy devices. I mean, they're extremely common in contemporary machines and they aren't likely to go the way of floppy drives any time soon.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

When you partitioned the new drive you used MBR instead of the newer GPT. GPT was introduced with Windows 8; if the machine came new with 7, it didn't support GPT until you updated the BIOS. It's MBR, not the drive, that's now considered legacy. It's kind of a pain because most machines that use GPT require you to change BIOS boot settings if you want to boot from DVD or USB, then change them back when you're done. But GPT boots faster and is a little more failsafe in case of partition table problems.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

backwoodsman7 said:


> When you partitioned the new drive you used MBR instead of the newer GPT. GPT was introduced with Windows 8; if the machine came new with 7, it didn't support GPT until you updated the BIOS. It's MBR, not the drive, that's now considered legacy. It's kind of a pain because most machines that use GPT require you to change BIOS boot settings if you want to boot from DVD or USB, then change them back when you're done. But GPT boots faster and is a little more failsafe in case of partition table problems.


I doubt that was the issue. The machine originally shipped with Windows 8.1, and I had the Windows 10 install routine format the SSD.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

Did you check and confirm that it is in fact GPT and not MBR? If so, what you're seeing seems a little strange. Let us know if you figure out what's causing it.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

backwoodsman7 said:


> Did you check and confirm that it is in fact GPT and not MBR? If so, what you're seeing seems a little strange. Let us know if you figure out what's causing it.


In Disk Management properties for that drive, "convert to GPT disk" is ghosted so I'm assuming that it's GPT. An HP laptop marketed 2 years ago with Windows 8.1 should have been able to handle GPT.


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## HermitJohn (May 10, 2002)

Windows can be installed either in legacy mode or UEFI. If UEFI, it will need to be GPT. If bios is set to legacy, windows could well have installed that way and formatted with mbr. I mean win10 will install on older systems that dont have UEFI. Depends how the installer saw it. If UEFI and Secure boot was active in bios, then windows would install UEFI and format GPT.


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