NVME Drive not able to Boot without another SSD drive connected

[effik1]

Hi,

 

I have 2 drives with Windows 10 on them in my PC. 1 smaller 250GB SSD that I have Windows 10 installation on + work related applications and then 1TB Nvme drive with Win 10 where I'm right now which I use for games etc.

 

My problem is I need to take the smaller SSD to a different PC but my system wont find the Nvme drive if the SSD is not connected (Boot Menu doesnt recognize the NVME drive but I can see the nvme in the BIOS normally - not sure if I have to enable something?). Once I connect it the system boots normally. I dont know how is this "relationship" between the 2 drives possible. Both of them have been reinstalled multiple times (formatted+clean Win 10 installation - I dont recall tho if they ever been wiped both at the same time since I usually use one of them for backing up stuff from the other drive when reinstalling), they were even in a different PC (diff mobo/CPU...) and this connection between them has been present in the diff PC as well.

 

Dont know if its relevant but in the PC there are 3 other HDDs that I take with me everytime I change a PC but they have no Win 10 installation on them (anymore) and I have never had a problem like that until I bought the NVME drive.

 

Does anyone have an idea how is this happening/how to resolve it?

 

EDIT:

 

I feel like this might help someone find what's wrong (Disk 0 is the Win 10 SSD and Disk 4 is the other Win 10 I'm on rn) as the partitions seem weird? 

 

 

[RONOTHAN##]

The boot partition is probably only on the one drive. What you will need to do is re install the bootloader on the NVMe drive. 

 

https://superuser.com/questions/1308324/create-efi-partition-before-installing-windows-10

 

Follow this guide and you should be good to go. 

[tonyrulez]

Next time installing Windows 10 disconnect every drive except the one you want it to be installed on. During install Windows might want to put the boot partition on an other drive despite not selecting that. I know this by experience when I also had an HDD connected during install and the boot partition was put there instead of the SSD. Luckily I noticed and did a reinstall with a disconnected HDD.

[effik1]

17 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

The boot partition is probably only on the one drive. What you will need to do is re install the bootloader on the NVMe drive. 

 

https://superuser.com/questions/1308324/create-efi-partition-before-installing-windows-10

 

Follow this guide and you should be good to go. 

 

Tried it but this showed up. I dont know what the "Free 2048 KB" means since the Nvme (Disk 4) has 182GB free right now.

 

I will try what Tonyrulez suggested, I think I already did that the first time I found out about it but I'm not sure tbh so I will try it again tomorrow and see if the problem is still there.

[RONOTHAN##]

3 minutes ago, effik1 said:

 

Tried it but this showed up. I dont know what the "Free 2048 KB" means since the Nvme (Disk 4) has 182GB free right now.

 

I will try what Tonyrulez suggested, I think I already did that the first time I found out about it but I'm not sure tbh so I will try it again tomorrow and see if the problem is still there.

This guide just doesn't have it, but there's three commands you need to run first.

list part
sel part #
shrink desired=500

Something like that. Replace the # with the partition number

Edited September 22, 2021 by RONOTHAN##
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