My experience with my car question last year showed me that I get more helpful information on this forum than in others more aligned with the topic. So here’s hoping you guys are as knowledgeable about computers as you are about cars.

So, my son just got a new desktop computer - a Dell Inspiron i5 gaming desktop running Windows 10. It came with a 1 TB hard drive. I’m trying to add a 240 GB ssd as the system drive and plan to use the hdd as a data drive. I’ve cloned the hdd to the ssd using Macrium Reflect - cloned all the partitions except the Dell Support partition, which I thought I probably wouldn’t need on the ssd, and I adjusted the partition sizes during cloning to the smaller ssd and to maximize the os partition at the end of the clone process. All of that looks good, and Win 10 sees the ssd with all of the cloned partitions and files.

Here’s where I’m stuck - how in the heck do I set the ssd as the boot drive? I haven’t messed with desktop systems since the IDE hdd days, where boot order was determined by position on the IDE cable. I’ve cloned hdd to ssd on all 5 of the laptops in the family, but those were replacements, not additions, to an ssd of equal or greater size, and boot up after the swap was no problem. When I go to bios on the Dell and look at boot options, all I get are Windows Boot Manager or network boot. There is a legacy boot setting, but I don’t think I should need to enable a legacy MBR boot. And when I use Windows Boot Manager from within Windows and go to the recovery options where I should be able to change boot options, there’s nothing there that allows me to select a different boot disk.

I also tried just disconnecting the hdd completely and connecting the ssd to the sata0 connector (the motherboard has 4 sata connectors) that the hdd was using. Also no boot, just a display that it was looking for a network boot. So, any ideas? Have I just not cloned the boot partition somehow? Should I just do a clean install of Windows on the ssd from the recovery usb drive my son created during Windows setup and not worry about cloning the hdd? I would prefer the clone to preserve all the Dell recovery stuff that may be hiding in there, but I’ll do a clean install if I have to. There’s plenty of info online about how to do this kind of thing, but I can’t seem to find a fix for this problem after quite a bit of searching.