Issues with SSD and SATA drives

Hi Rookie_Programmer

I am Dave, an Independent Advisor, I will help you with this . . .

1
If you have successfully cloned the HDD (C drive) to the SSD (D drive) then to get your PC to boot form the SSD, you need to change the boot sequence in BIOS, not in MSConfig

To change the boot sequence, boot into BIOS, then find the tab with the options of which is the primary boot device and set the SSD as the primary boot device, save those settings and restart your PC

2
With regards to that unallocated space, you have two options, you can create a new partition on that unallocated space, by right clicking in Disk Management and choosing New - Simple Volume

Or, you can add that unallocated space to the C Drive using a 3rd party partitioning utility like the free version of AOMEI Partition Assistant, because Windows 10 has limited partitioning capability and can only extend into a partition that is directly to the right of the partition

Dave, I am not sure if your statement of "if I have successfully cloned" applies, as I cloned them over each other multiple times in my frustration of trying to transfer over files from my old PC.  Basically, I cloned from old PC onto this one, but kept overwriting the two drives, as I was having trouble figuring out if the Windows files, my user data, my documents, and my programs were all there.

I was unable to find any drives in the BIOS Boot tab, though both show up in the Main tab (pictures attached).  As you can see, the "Boot List Option" is grayed out, but I am not sure if that is relevant.

I also remembered that disk defragmenter sees both drives as SDDs, even though only D is an SSD (picture at bottom).  Their "current statuses" are interesting, but I have no idea what they mean.  I also am not sure if the Windows files on D are "valid", so to speak.

As for the unallocated space, would you recommend leaving it as-is or appending it to C?  I am not sure how much either option speeds up / slows down my system in the long run or if unallocated space is automatically appended if I reach a certain amount of usage for C,

As a reminder, the C drive (HDD) is the current boot drive, and my biggest concern is that I want to avoid losing any of my data/files.

Hi Rookie_Programmer

What type of drives to you have are both the HDD and SSD just ordinary SATA drives connected to the motherboard by SATA cables?

As you can see in my task manager pictures, task manager correctly identifies them as HDD and SSD.

I bought the computer from Dell, and don't know for sure how they are connected, but for some reason, I'm leaning towards both having SATA cables.

When I first set up this PC, before doing all of the cloning, etc. it all worked fine, so I think it may be something with all of the cloning and overwriting.

Hi Rookie_Programmer

If both drives are connected to the motherboard with SATA cables, then it would just be a matter of swapping those cables around on the motherboard and your PC should boot from the other drive

Will swapping them cause any issues?  As I said, I am not sure if the Windows OS on the SSD will work, and I am also not good with hardware.

I also don't see how this addresses all of the other issues discussed above.

Hi Rookie_Programmer

Swapping the SATA cables will do no harm, that will either work or it won't, if it does not work, then you can always swap the cables back to their original configuration