It's still the best way to test.  Only when you know it will boot and everything is working properly with the ssd, you can then adding the hdd back, using Windows built-in tool Diskpart to clean the drive of all partitions, format it for data drive.
Hi, my pc came with both a hdd and a ssd but i always just used the hdd until recently. I cloned my hdd drive to the ssd drive but when I went to bios, I only see windows manager and clicking it doesn't open it. How do I change the order? Why did they have to make everything so confusing when it use to be so simple to do.   I'm 68 now and not as tech savvy as i use to be, please help
Changing boot order