baffling storage issue What just happened?

[Tieox]

Tonight I removed a 1TB Mechanical HD from my system, I even formatted it before removing it, as the plan later in the week was to replace it with a SSD.  However after doing this my computer would not boot.  It would post and go into the bios after flashing the screen several times.  After trial and error I re-inserted the mechanical drive and the system booted no problem, even though the OS was on my 860 Pro SSD, and showed this on desktop. Once again removing the drive resulted in being unable to boot.

 

In the end I wiped all the SSD's (glad I had backups) and reinstalled Windows, only noticing when setting back up my fan curves that the booting SSD now showed in bios as a Windows Boot Manager.   

 

Is it possible that even though my OS was installed on my SSD, the Boot Manager was on the mechanical drive? and how the hell does that happen? I have never run the OS from a mechanical drive in this computer since I built it!

 

Storage layout is

 

860 Pro OS

 

850 Pro Games

 

1TB Seagate Barracuda - When removed caused no boot, until I formatted both SSD's and clean installed Windows 10.

[SavageNeo]

49 minutes ago, Kierax said:

s it possible that even though my OS was installed on my SSD, the Boot Manager was on the mechanical drive

Yes, happened to me once, you needed to make sure that your ssd was one to your system to boot.

I had the same problem when enabling xmp mode on ram? have you enabled it? If you have try to boot without xmp, then enable xmp and boot, that is when you know that, that is your problem. 

51 minutes ago, Kierax said:

and how the hell does that happen?

Mayby bug in bios. Make sure to use the latest bios and chipset drivers, from you manufactures official website (upgddade the audio,bluetooth and lan from there also)

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, Kierax said:

 

Is it possible that even though my OS was installed on my SSD, the Boot Manager was on the mechanical drive?

That's exactly what happened.

 

3 hours ago, Kierax said:

and how the hell does that happen? I have never run the OS from a mechanical drive in this computer since I built it!

Hard to tell. It's not uncommon when migrating to an SSD or dual-booting. If you had used the HDD before, and it had the boot manager from another system, it could be the case that the Windows installer detected it and added itself there, rather than creating a new partition in the SDD (the intended behavior is for all OSes to register in the same boot manager partition, or good ol' MBR).

 

I think you can avoid reinstalling by removing the HDD, then using Windows' install media to boot and ask it to repair the boot partition - at least that's how I dealt with migrated OS drives that didn't contain the MBR partition.

 

[Spicedaddy]

I've seen this before, best way to avoid it 100% is to install Windows with only the OS drive plugged in. After Windows is installed, add secondary drives.