Sep 17, 2025

Inaccessible Boot Device after Installing SSD to a New Machine

After moving my SSD from my old laptop to my new laptop, I got Inaccessible_Boot_Device error for Windows 11.

With a little digging around I found that Windows simply could not find my SSD with:

echo list volume | diskpart

Fortunately Microsoft has a pretty detailed cause list here.

I found that my old BIOS and new BIOS had different storage controller, i.e. SATA operations (AHCI vs. RAID). After I modified the new system's configuration to be the same as the old one the problem went away.