MY OS won't boot without my HDD

[mycathurt]

I want to upgrade my 2TB HDD to a 4TB HDD and I thought it would be simple, taking 10 minutes max because my OS is in my SSD, which has been untouched in the process of taking out the first 2TB HDD and putting in the 4TB one. But when I attempt to boot it, but then I get the Windows Recovery Blue Screen. I plugged in my old HDD and my booting sequence was perfectly fine and had no issues with Windows.

 

What is the issue and how can I fix it?

[Ashleyyyy]

most likely you had both drives plugged in when you installed Windows and it put the boot loader on the wrong drive.

 

can you just open partition management in Windows and screenshot it? so we can see the partition layout of your drives?

[mycathurt]

5 minutes ago, Ashley said:

most likely you had both drives plugged in when you installed Windows and it put the boot loader on the wrong drive.

 

can you just open partition management in Windows and screenshot it? so we can see the partition layout of your drives?

 

[Ashleyyyy]

1 minute ago, mycathurt said:

 

as I expected... you can see on the top 2TB drive there is the 200mb partition, that's the boot loader. 

 

now, I'm not sure how to move that over to your ssd. 

 

@GoodBytes you probably know... 

[AshRiver]

You can use EaseUS Partition Master to clone that 200MB partition on Drive 0 to Drive 2. Before doing this, do a backup of your system if things gone wrong. 

[foldingNoob]

pretty sure you can fix this with the windows install disk. Remove all drives except the one you want windows to boot from and use the repair tool.

[C2dan88]

Do what AshRiver suggests or create a new boot partition on your drive as instructed here using installation media

https://www.tenforums.com/installation-upgrade/52837-moving-recreating-efi-partition.html#post698505

 

[GoodBytes]

 

4 hours ago, Ashley said:

@GoodBytes you probably know... 

Solution, already mentioned

 

5 hours ago, mycathurt said:

I want to upgrade my 2TB HDD to a 4TB HDD and I thought it would be simple, taking 10 minutes max because my OS is in my SSD, which has been untouched in the process of taking out the first 2TB HDD and putting in the 4TB one. But when I attempt to boot it, but then I get the Windows Recovery Blue Screen. I plugged in my old HDD and my booting sequence was perfectly fine and had no issues with Windows.

 

What is the issue and how can I fix it?

In the future, make sure that your SSD is on the motherboard first (main) controller and SATA port. As this is where Windows will put its boot partition. If your SSD is a PCIe M.2 one, some motherboards sadly don't mark them as the primary drive, but rather SATA ones (probably because they took a board design that they had and added M.2 slot after, and too cheap to change this after. Heck some motherboard manufacturers apparently only have 1 person doing the BIOS for all their boards, so I am not surprised). The solution for this is to unplug your SATA drive when installing Windows, and plug it back in, after the OS is installed (of course, while the system is turned off).

[Ashleyyyy]

1 hour ago, GoodBytes said:

In the future, make sure that your SSD is on the motherboard first (main) controller and SATA port. As this is where Windows will put its boot partition. If your SSD is a PCIe M.2 one, some motherboards sadly don't mark them as the primary drive, but rather SATA ones (probably because they took a board design that they had and added M.2 slot after, and too cheap to change this after. Heck some motherboard manufacturers apparently only have 1 person doing the BIOS for all their boards, so I am not surprised). The solution for this is to unplug your SATA drive when installing Windows, and plug it back in, after the OS is installed (of course, while the system is turned off).

you can make this process much more simple, just unplug all other drives when installing Windows. 

Edited May 26, 2020 by Ashley xD