I don’t know if this is a new topic, but I’m new to Scrivener and I can’t seem to find the answer to this question.
I have a completed ms (novel) that I want to upload to Scrivener. My question is once I do, will it automatically identify the chapter breaks and create the index cards for me? If not, what can I do (short of manually creating each chapter card)? 
There are a couple of ways to do this.
The manual way is to import the document File > Import > Files. This will bring it into Scrivener in one long monolithic document, withe one entry in the Binder. Then you go through the imported document, putting the cursor at the start of each new chapter and splitting it into new documents. I.e.
(1) Navigate to Chapter 2. Press cmd-K and you split the document into two at that point. The new document’s title will be that of the previous one -1 so you will have to rename it as you go along.
Alternatively, highlight some text and press shift-cmd-K and it will split the document with the highlighted text as the new document’s title.
(2) Navigate to Chapter 3 and repeat…
There is an automatic way, but this requires your Word file to have some form of physical marker to denote Chapter divisions.
E.g. @@Chapter 1
You can then use File > Import > Import and Split, entering @@ into the subsequent dialogue box ‘Sections are marked with’ field.
This will create a new document every time it encounters @@, using the text after @@ as its title.
Finally, Index Cards
Every document in Scrivener has its own index card automatically – you can’t avoid it, so there’s no need to do anything to create them. Press cmd-2 to toggle between the Editor view and the Corkboard view to see index cards.
NB: Corkboard view is there to give an overview to help you shift scenes around, so it doesn’t show the card if you only have one document selected in the Binder. (All the information is still available in that document’s Inspector though.) To see the cards, either select more than one document, or highlight the Folder in the binder that contains the document then toggle cmd-2 to switch to Corkboard View if it’s not already visible.
NB2: The cards themselves only contain the Title of the document at first. The front of the card is normally used for synopses and so isn’t printed out by default when you compile the document for printing etc.
You can add the synopses to them manually, or you can use the Documents > Auto-generate Synopses command which will add the first few lines of the actual text to the Index Card.
HTH
David