Ssd not “primary”?

[Flux Azreal]

So I was re installing windows and noticed my primary drive is my extra storage hhd drive, idk if this impacts performance or whatever but is there a way to change primary type to my ssd? Or it dosent matter?

[Enderman]

Well first of all you should never isntall windows with more than 1 drive plugged in.

[Mira Yurizaki]

A "Primary" partition just means it can support booting into an OS. This is opposed to an "Extended" partition which has more flexibility at the cost of not being able to boot into an OS.

[Flux Azreal]

12 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Well first of all you should never isntall windows with more than 1 drive plugged in.

Why not?

[Enderman]

31 minutes ago, Flux Azreal said:

Why not?

Because it's stupid and puts stuff on the wrong drives then has all kinds of problems.

The only way to be sure all partitions are made correctly is to unplug all except one drive while installing.

[Enderman]

17 minutes ago, Arika S said:

never had that happen before.

Welp, a few hundred people on this forum have, so it's good to avoid that possibility by only having one drive plugged in while installing.

[homeap5]

6 hours ago, Arika S said:

never had that happen before.

You may have problem with one situation - when you try to install Windows on new drive. Windows trying to use the same bootloader instead creating new one, so if it finds one drive in system that contains bootloader - it uses that one. If you have no system on any drive (and no bootable partitions / bootloaders) and you want to install new system, you'll be fine even with other drives plugged in.

 

Unplugging other drivers is something like insurance policy - if it's not a big problem, it takes only few seconds to unplug drives and you'll be sure that you don't must to check everything.

[GoodBytes]

13 hours ago, Arika S said:

never had that happen before.

The issue are that (listing possibilities)

• People plug their SATA drives in whatever order, and not the primary drive to the first SATA port.
• For motherboards have multiple SATA controllers, things gets iffy on who is the first, if you connect your drives on different controllers.
• For system with NVMe + SATA drive, things also get complicated as some motherboard makes the NVMe drive secondary and the SATA first, while others the reverse.

Beside the first bullet point above, there is nothing that the user can do.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Here's one way you can tell there won't be a problem when having more than one storage drive or partition already available when installing Windows: Is there a "System Reserved" partition?

 

If not, then there's no bootloader. And I'm pretty sure Windows won't go "oh, I'll just put a bootloader on the first drive I see even though the user selected another one" since I've installed Windows plenty of times on my PCs with multiple storage drives and the OS drive was not the first one listed.

 

Besides that, if there's already a partition on the drive, it's covering the entire drive, and you didn't select it to install Windows onto, Windows can't put a bootloader on that drive anyway because it requires shrinking the existing partitions. Which, you know, is a big no-no.