Windows 10 Boot Issues

[Alex Berry]

For a long time, I had 6 hard drives in my desktop. 1 240GB SSD for the Windows 10 installation, and the other 5 drives were just storage (3 1TB and 2 2TB). I recently consolidated 3 of these drives onto a new 6TB drive (2 of the 1TB and 1 of the 2TB). I then removed those 3 drives so that I could install a new 1TB SSD to use solely for game installations (I had run out of SATA ports so I had to make room for the 1TB SSD) and installed the new SSD. In the process I switched around which drives were plugged into specific SATA ports so that both SSD's were pugged into SATA3 ports. After doing all of this, my computer would no longer boot. I've tried a lot of troubleshooting (which I'll detail below) and gotten way outside my league. Looking for suggestions/help before I move forward on my own and cause more problems unknowingly or, worse, have to perform a clean install.

 

My PC Specs:

Mobo: ASRock Z77 Extreme4

CPU: Intel i5-3570k

RAM: 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3-1600

Video Card: Asus GTX 1060 3GB

PSU: Corsair HX750 (older model with blue HX lettering and vertical lines)

 

 

Upon powering on, black screen shows "Reboot and select proper boot device, or insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"

UEFI detects all SATA devices correctly

Weirdly wouldn't boot from DVD drive. Tried 2 DVDs, an old Ubuntu DVD (unsure if was working) and old Ultimate Boot CD (100% sure used to work years ago).

Tried disconnecting all SATA devices and only connecting one at a time, 0 changes

Reset UEFI to defaults and cleared CMOS, 0 changes

Rearranged SATA cables to put boot SSD in original SATA port, 0 changes

Created fresh Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS bootable on brand new ADATA 16GB USB drive. Upon booting to this drive, got "unable to find a medium containing a live file system" error.

Got a similar error testing Ububtu drive on Asus laptop

Assumed Ubuntu drive was bad

Created Windows bootable USB using different, brand new SanDisk 64GB drive, successfully booted to this

Startup repair doesn't work

Tried sfc /scannow, returned "windows resource protection could not perform the requested operation"

Tried chkdsk /r on C: drive, turned out my new 6TB drive was being recognized as the C drive so this lasted 11 hours

Rearranged SATA cables to put SSDs back in SATA3 ports

Boot SSD now detected as C: drive

Ran chkdsk /f on C: drive, fixed some simple issue that I can't remember

Still can't boot

Tried using diskpart to set partition as active, 0 changes

Bootrec returned "element not found" error for both /rebuildbcd and /fixboot

Bootrec /fixmbr reported success

Bcdedit /export C:\BCDBackup reported "system device cannot be found"

Tried switching Windows USB drive from USB3 port to USB2 port

Bootrec and Bcdedit errors remain the same

 

Current status: after powering on and after passing the ASRock splash screen I end up at a black screen saying "An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" 

 

I'm already way outside my league, and am afraid of going further for fear of creating more problems rather than solving any.

 

I don't know much about this, but is it possible that the EFI partition was located on one of the hard drives that I removed? They were all connected at the time of the Windows 10 installation to the 240GB SSD.

 

Many thanks in advance to anyone willing to offer their expertise.

[BiotechBen]

Ran into similar problem also with ASRock, so when you go into BIOS, set boot order to Boot Manager first l, then the drive that has your OS. When I tried to have the drive as the first boot device it freaked out and was like "oh no, no OS! THE SKY IS FALLING!" And all it was was the boot order  it being exactly what it was suspecting. The other option would be if you have a windows media USB to try booting from that and adding an image to one of the spinning disks and when promoted which partition you want to boot from, choosing the SSD.

[Alex Berry]

7 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Ran into similar problem also with ASRock, so when you go into BIOS, set boot order to Boot Manager first l, then the drive that has your OS. When I tried to have the drive as the first boot device it freaked out and was like "oh no, no OS! THE SKY IS FALLING!" And all it was was the boot order  it being exactly what it was suspecting. The other option would be if you have a windows media USB to try booting from that and adding an image to one of the spinning disks and when promoted which partition you want to boot from, choosing the SSD.

I've already tried setting the boot order correctly. I can skip that all together and use the F11 command (boot menu or something) and select any boot device directly. Selecting the SSD with the Windows installation returns "An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Selecting the Windows media USB works as normal, which is what allowed me to access the CMD prompt and attempt stuff like chkdsk and bootrec.

 

Could you be more specific about what you mean when you say add an image to one of the spinning disks? Do you mean to straight up install another instance of Windows 10 on them? If you do, I'm guessing this would create a new bootloader somewhere which would allow me to boot from the SSD.

[BiotechBen]

A. If you have a laptop or something, you can create a windows media creation tool usb to boot off of that. Then when you go to boot, remove the SSD that already has windows.

 

A.1 When it doesn't detect windows, you can put a new image of windows onto one of the Hard drives (spinning disks).

 

B. If it boots up like that, then something in your SSD's installation of windows has become corrupted or unreadable.

 

C. If that works, shut down your system and try booting up again. If it asks which partition to boot into and you see more than one, then it may just have been something going wonky. If it doesn't show up, continue into windows and see if it shows up in the drive list. 

 

D. If it shows up within the drive list, copy anything that you want to keep to one of the hard drives, and then reformat the boot drive with a new image of windows following the same steps in part A.1 with the SSD as the target for the new system image for windows.

[pryinglynx_nerve]

Sounds like there are multiple UEFI entries pointing to C:\ - the new SSD & the old SSD.

Do you have any experience using something like BootIce to clearing UEFI tables? Macrium Recovery has a windows boot rebuilding tool baked into their recovery USB that you could try.

[Alex Berry]

I ended up giving up and deciding to do a fresh install. I installed Win10 on my 1TB SSD and am currently in the process of backing up my 240GB SSD. After that's done, I'm going to format my 240GB SSD and reinstall Win10 on that to use as my main boot drive.

 

After installing Win10 on my 1TB SSD, there was no bootloader to prompt me to choose my other installation of Win10. So clearly something is horribly wrong, and it's just way too complex for me to bother with. This is worst case scenario for me, as I had a ton of complicated software installed that I'm now going to have to go back through and re-install. Specifically, multiple DAWs with many plugins.