W8 on SSD next to HDD with W8 installed gives boot loop

Hello everyone! First of all, sorry for the horrible thread title, it's hard to explain my problem in one short sentence.

I recently purchased the Asus N550JV-CN270H and decided to replace the DVD drive with an HDD Caddy so that I could put an SSD in my laptop. I placed the HDD in the HDD Caddy and the SSD in the place where the HDD was mounted since the DVD drive's SATA connection is slower, which would have an impact on SSD performance.

I installed Windows 8.1 (DreamSpark ISO) using the UEFI installation guide from Eightforums. The first phase of the installation went fine (copying files over to the SSD and such). However, whenever I select my SSD in the Windows 8 boot manager my laptop gets stuck in a boot loop (black screen > backlight turns on > black screen > backlight turns on > black screen etc.). The only way to interrupt this is by forcing the Windows 8 boot manager to show up and selecting my HDD installation again.

I noticed while installing that my computer only makes two partitions on the SSD (as opposed to the 4 partitions that get created in the installation guide). The recovery and system partitions don't get created, probably because the original HDD has those already. I have no clue whether this could be the problem or not, but I think it's worth mentioning.

Now as for my question: If the old Windows installation is the problem, is there any way to install Windows 8 on my SSD without having to format my HDD beforehand? I would like to keep the old Windows 8 installation until I'm sure that the new one is functioning fine.

If the old installation couldn't possibly be the problem, what could be my issue? The SSD is mounted just fine in my old installation and I can copy/paste files to my SSD without problems.

Thanks for reading,
Django/Xythus

Remove the HDD from the computer before you install Windows to the SSD.

You need to select to boot from the UEFI type (marked UEFI in the boot menu) if you want to install Windows 8 64-bit in UEFI boot mode (see screenshot below).

You may notice a bootable USB flash drive showing twice in the boot menu, one marked UEFI and one not marked UEFI.



Here is more info: Windows 7/8 setup: Installing using Legacy BIOS Boot Mode or UEFI Boot Mode.

What apparently happened is that the bootmgr for the SSD system ended up on the HDD. You can only avoid that if you remove the HDD during the SSD installation. Follow the advice of Genet and you should be OK.