Shutdown Inproperly, Now It Won’t Boot Anymore!

[Ricky808]

Hi guys,

 

So just now i had to get a fan cable from out of my PC. Took the cable out, screw the PC back up, reconnected all the cables and pressed the power button.

 

My PC started up in some repair mode I think, and then booted off an old drive.

 

Backstory, I cloned my old drive onto a HDD that’s in my PC, but never booted off of it. I used my M.2 Samsung Evo as my boot and main drive, and always booted perfectly off of this drive.

 

So for some reason my PC choose to boot of the old drive. Didn’t want that so I disconnected all the drives in my PC BUT the M.2. Here’s the funny thing, it is NOT bootable.

 

M.2 shows up in BIOS, but whenever I try boot it all of a sudden says: Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key_

 

I never had a single problem with this drive or with this PC. I read all about clean installing my Windows, but I don’t wanna reinstall everything I have on there, before I asked around.

 

I have a Windows Boot USB, and when I try the Upgrade Windows option it says it can’t be done from an installation USB.

 

sidenote: when I’m about to re-install I can see the partitions being there; 1 of 15MB MSR (Reserved) and one of 465.7GB, with some free space and it says Primary.

 

I really need some help before I go do all of it on my own and possibly mess it up even harder.

 

thanks in advance guys!

[Ricky808]

Edit: I cannot even re-install Windows, because when I go about it, it says for both the partitions: Windows cannot be installed here.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

9 minutes ago, Ricky808 said:

Edit: I cannot even re-install Windows, because when I go about it, it says for both the partitions: Windows cannot be installed here.

You'd have to delete the partitions first. 

[Ricky808]

Do I lose everything then?

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

But before that, unless it's too late, plug all of your drives back in and go to your BIOS. Change your boot order, or otherwise choose the M.2 as your boot drive.

 

If that works, it means that your boot sector and your Windows installation are on different storage drives. This can happen when you install Windows while there are multiple disks plugged into the system, and especially when Windows or another OS is already installed on one of those disks.

[Ricky808]

Oh my, i feel very dumb. When I opened the back of my PC I noticed one SATA cable in another drive was not in there properly. I packed all of them extra tight in their connectors, and BOOM, everything worked. I also saw in the boot menu that it said Windows Boot Manager. For some reason that was not on my main M.2 drive. Is there anyway to make sure that if the SATA connectors fail again, my M.2 can still boot up?

 

thanks so much also, although it might be so so simple, you really helped me out here!

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

2 hours ago, Ricky808 said:

Is there anyway to make sure that if the SATA connectors fail again, my M.2 can still boot up?

Probably yes. You would need a USB installation Media.

 

1. Unplug all of the drives except the M.2.
2. Boot into the Installation media.
3. Go to the Command Prompt.
4. Follow the steps for Windows 10 here:
   1. https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-mbr/#Fix_the_MBR_in_Windows_10

Please reply as I did above or @HairlessMonkeyBoy, so that I get a notification.

[Ricky808]

@HairlessMonkeyBoy ah sorry!

 

thanks for the advice, will give that a try, didn’t seem too hard! Thanks again!