esata cable port on MB - does it matter which one is used?

I have an older Dell 8100 XPS box with windows 7 pro 64 bit installed on a WD hard drive, 1 Tb. I purchased a SSD Samsung 850Pro 1 TB and am attempting to clone my wd primary drive to the SSD. I tried once by using a USB port connection but windows won't boot from the new drive.

Because of the tight space in my box, I've had to remove my video card in order to get to the only available empty sata port on my MB in order to attach the new sata cable. That done, I attached the other end and power to the new SSD drive. I've replaced the video card and booted into the PE disk that I created using Macrium Reflect Pro. I can see this second drive as a second drive. It is identified as an unformatted drive, MBR Disk 2 953.87 GB.

My WD hard drive is 931.51GB, shown as MBR Disk 1 with a #1 partition of 100 mb (24.8 mb in use) and a #2 primary partition formatted NTFS with 551.87 GB in use.

Before attempting a clone or an image, I have two questions. While I do work in my box, I'm technically challenged and don't want to get into a pickle that I can't resolve alone. I have the new drive installed in the box. When I booted back into windows BEFORE attempting my clone, windows evidently recognized a new bit of hardware because it installed new device drivers. But when I go to see if the new drive is showing up, only my WD primary hard drive is recognized, along with the optical drives.

Might the reason be because it is not formatted?

Also, once the clone is done and I remove the sata cable and power cable from the WD drive, in order to attempt to reboot using my new SSD, do I need to move the sata cable attached to the SSD to the sata port on the MB where the current WD hard drive is attached? Does it make a difference which MB port is used. I know to remove the old WD hard drive before attempting to boot using the new drive. Just don't know if the cables need to be switched.

I tried to clone once and windows wouldn't boot from the new drive. One gentleman suggested I install Puppy and check to see if the partition Dell installs as a recovery partition is active but I'm a bit nervous about doing this as I might get myself into a bad spot and not be able to correct things by myself. Is Puppy another OS, albeit a fairly simple one?

Someone else suggested I try to image the drive and then a restore, rather than cloning. I do have a usb 1 tb drive but I use it for a backup drive but I'd have to remove some files in order to have enough available space. By creating an image, would I need much more available space on the receiving drive than the size of the used space on my primary hard drive?

If this second clone attempt doesn't work, I may just wait until after the holidays before doing a clean install on the new SSD.

My thanks for all you guys do to help. I deeply appreciate all the advice and suggestions given on this forum.

MEL

Berton said:

Yes, Puppy is a version of Linux and available as a bootable CD or bootable DVD. I use Linux Mint 17, some say it's most like Windows in that it has a 'taskbar' with a 'start' button. I have it on a Desktop and a Notebook with an SSD drive, had all the necessary drivers built-in except for my printers which were available on the 'net.

After re-reading I just caught onto the Subject line of esata cable port on MB - does it matter which one is used?, basically eSATA is a port on the back of computers used for External SATA drives.
Serial ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The SATA cable and the eSATA cable are different.

Thank you so much for your most helpful reply. And thank you for the correction regarding the difference between the SATA ports (oh, now I see, the 'e' identifies the port as an external port!)

MEL

My sincere thanks to everyone on these forums who help educate and inform.

I can happily report that my second attempt to clone my old WD 1TB hard drive with W7 Pro to a new SSD Samsung 850 pro 1TB was successful! I am so thrilled with this update. Extremely fast boot and program openings, which was the main reason I wanted to make this change. Gosh, seconds from turn on to desktop. Amazing.

Because of all the answers given to my assorted questions, I was able to handle this on my own and I so appreciate all of you who so willingly give of your time and expertise.

a very grateful

MEL

You're quite welcome, glad to help whenever possible.