boot bonanza

chinustrike · December 3, 2019

Hey guys. So I have 2 drives on my system, one ssd, and a hard drive. i have installed windows 10 on ssd, and I keep the hdd for storage. however the hdd had windows oncee, and then i formatted it. but the boot managers(I had linux also in there) are still there in the hdd. what happened is, in the bios, i have set the boot priority as the ssd as hdd only has data and no OS. what happened yesterday was, i took out the hdd for some reason, and booted without it with ssd inside as it had the OS. but it did not boot. the system went directly into the bios. when i selected the ssd boot manager, nothing happened. i was greeted with a blank screen which stared at me forever. so i thought to put the hdd back in. then what happened is, windows used the boot manager of the hdd to boot into the windows which was there on the ssd.!! i know right? very wierd. now only if I select the boot manager of the hdd, the system boots(into the windows on the ssd) i restarted, disconnected cables and everything. no good.. I recently did a bios up[date through @ebios, a gigabyte utility, that lets you update the bios while in windows. does that have anything to do with it? please help guys. i run an i3 9100f with 16 gigs of ddr4 , gigabyte b360M gamung Hd motherboard with an gtx 1660. nybody know what is going on? thanks...

Tea-Sir · December 3, 2019

That sounds like a mess. If you had the HDD as drive 0 and the SSD as drive 1, it could have caused this. (The the HDD was in Sata port 1, and the SSD port 2).

If I where you, I would take backup of your stuff on the SSD. Unplug the HDD, and then re-install Windows on the SSD, and then plug the HDD back in. That way the SSD should be the only boot drive.

If possible, you could remove all partitions on the HDD and then format it.

If it has been a boot drive once, there can be some hidden partitions you need to get rid of.

chinustrike · December 3, 2019

1 hour ago, The89Lunder said:

That sounds like a mess. If you had the HDD as drive 0 and the SSD as drive 1, it could have caused this. (The the HDD was in Sata port 1, and the SSD port 2).

If I where you, I would take backup of your stuff on the SSD. Unplug the HDD, and then re-install Windows on the SSD, and then plug the HDD back in. That way the SSD should be the only boot drive.

If possible, you could remove all partitions on the HDD and then format it.

If it has been a boot drive once, there can be some hidden partitions you need to get rid of.

hello @The89Lunder. thank you so much for replying to my post. I had ssd in the SATA 0 port and it showed up as rive 0 in windows with attribute "System drive -yes" and HDD in SATA 1 port which showed up as disk 1 in windows with attributes "system drive- No". I had formatted the HDD but the bootmanagers were still intact. but i don't understand hpwcan a boot point on hdd boot to the OS on the SSD?

Tea-Sir · December 3, 2019

I can't say how that happened. But I have seen it happen before. If didn't remove all partitions on the HDD, there is often still a boot sector in the hard drive. Windows might just use it, if it is there.

I had both XP and Vista installed back in the day, and I had this problem too. The only thing that worked, was to unplug the drive that I wasn't installing Windows on, while I was installing it.