Bootable Media not recognizing internal SSD [SOLVED]

The SSD may need formatting in order to be recognized. Insert it as a second drive and then boot the OS. Then right click on MY COMPUTER and select MANAGE. Then select DISK MANAGEMENT of the left. The SSD will probably appear as disk1. See screen capture attached. Right click on it and create a single new simple NTFS volume. Only do a QUICK FORMAT with SSDs. Acronis restore will create any other partitions that are needed. That might solve your problem

I didn't see that you have a laptop so you probably can't have 2 internal drives to do what I suggested. There are ways to boot software from the DVD drive or USB drive that can do the formatting. But if you can boot the OS from the HDD connected via USB, then do that, and proceed to format the SSD as in above. Or connect the SSD as a second drive in someone else's computer and do the formatting.

So, you were right about formatting. The SSD was completely unformatted, so I did a quick format (NTFS), while it was connected via USB to SATA connector. Then made another USB Bootable drive, turned off laptop, installed SSD internally and connected HDD to USB and booted up. The SSD still didn't show up in the Linux Acronis environment. So I swapped drives, checked Disk Manager again and set the SSD to ACTIVE and assigned it a drive letter (F:). This time, when I restarted everything, I got a black screen immediately with the message "BOOTMGR Not Found Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart".

I included a screen capture of my current Disk Management screen.

I've had some trouble with restore after making a drive active during formatting. And I’m not that familiar with the arrangement of your partitions on your working disk 0. Guessing the first partition is the restore data from the company that brings yoyr system back to the way it was upon purchase. Anyway, I would delete the entire the partition of the SSD and re-create a new single partition quick NTFS format, like you did before. I'm not familiar with the Linux Acronis boot, unless that's what they normally provide. After formatting and inserting the SSD I would boot from the Acronis TI CD and use that software to do a restore from an image of the HDD that was saved on another drive. Or is it that you never made a back-up of your HDD on another drive, from which to restore? If not, do that if you have another drive, or borrow one, and then restore the SSD from the HDD back-up. If you don't have another drive and are doing a clone, then I'm not that familiar with that process, but there are Acronis users who should know how to work that. If your current HDD disk 0, as it is, works fine, then your restored SSD should work the same way, once it becomes a clone of the HDD. If you don't have an Acronis CD disk, from your account on Acronis with a registered license, you can download an image that can be burnt to a file on a blank CD or DVD, that can be used to boot their recovery software.

If you have a new Kingston or Crucial SSD, their tech support is very good, and they can assist by phone with the cloning process for a laptop. I also found this link below (see attached) which looks like what you are looking to do. Scroll down and they have a lot of images of the process that might help. But I'm not sure if having your SSD internally and the HDD connected via USB, is causing a problem.

http://techsultan.com/how-to-clone-hard-drive-using-acronis-true-image-…

Thanks for all your help. Turns out it was simply a driver with the SSD.