Cloned HDD Issue/Question

I recently did a buddy a favor and did some work on one of his computers.

It's an i3 Gateway with a 1TB HDD and running Win8 (though without install media) that he picked up as a refurb. He also got his hands on a 120GB SSD and naturally wanted to put that in as his primary drive.

I successfully cloned the original HDD onto the SSD using EaseUS ToDo Backup Free without problems. The SSD is running as the primary drive without problems (and the buddy is more than happy at its boot speed).

The problem I'm running into is with the old 1TB HDD. The idea is to keep it in the same machine as a second drive where all of the user data, etc. can be stored.

Now, I pulled that HDD out of the machine and using a SATA-to-USB adapter, I plugged it in to my laptop, deleted all of the partitions on that drive and created one new 1TB partition (931.51 GB actually, which comes out the exact same as the 1TB HDD I have also running in the laptop), performed a quick format on the drive and finally gave it a different name.

Unfortunately, the i3 doesn't recognize the old drive. It doesn't show up in either Windows Disk Management or in EaseUS Partition Master. I've swapped SATA cords, used different SATA ports on the mobo, and swapped out power cords, and the Gateway still doesn't recognized the old HDD.

(However, when I plug it into a different machine as an external, there is ~100MB of storage space used, though no hidden files that show up in Explorer. Now, when I deleted the various partitions, there were four "blocks" before the primary partition, one ~300MB and one ~400MB which were system partitions, plus blocks just before each that I could not delete using Partiion Master, but which seem to have been "absorbed" once I deleted the 300 & 400MB partitions and expanded the whole drive into one single partition.)

I know this is something (relatively) stupid and easy that I missed, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is. I'm sure he i3 still sees the old HDD and the new SSD as having the same hardware profile/ID, but how do I fix that? The one thing I have't done yet was a low-level format or complete drive wipe because of the time factor, but my gut tells me that won't solve the issue.


Thanks in advance!

 

Delete.