Windows 10 boot drive issues

eliaspr · September 6, 2017

Hello everybody,

I had a 128 GB SSD a while ago as my primary boot drive. I had issues with it, and because I didn't want to risk any data loss, I re-installed Windows 10 on another hard drive I had laying around. Not the best choice for the OS drive, but I don't care. Anyways, after moving my OS to the HDD I used the SSD as a temporary data storage when I was editing videos. Now, I've got an old laptop that I want to put the SSD in to check if it still works. But when I remove the SSD from my desktop computer, I get an error message when booting that tells my that no boot device could be found.

I've already checked the BIOS, but I couldn't find a solution. And even though, I formatted the SSD, I get a message asking me from which drive I want to start.

Is there any important information on the SSD but not the hard drive that makes the SSD special? And if there is, how can I "copy" that information to the HDD without necessarily having to re-install Windows because that would involve copying about 500GB of other random data?

Thanks in advance,

Elias

GoodBytes · September 6, 2017

It is because when you installed Windows, you had your SSD on SATA0 port and your HDD on SATA1 port. So while you installed Windows on your HDD, the boot manager was installed on the first drive: SATA0. In addition, your SSD, as it already had Windows before, had the boot partition there, and you didn't remove it, so it reused it. It should have been deleted or have the SSD removed from the system.

eliaspr · September 6, 2017

Thanks for the answer, but is there a simple way to fix that?

GoodBytes · September 6, 2017

The simplest way, is to backup all your data, and restart from scratch. Meaning wipe everything, every partitions, and reinstall Windows.

What you can try, instead:

- Backup your important data in the case it makes things worst.

- Boot from Windows setup on the system that can't find Windows to boot, and try a repair.

- Try this: http://www.dell.com/support/article/ca/en/cabsdt1/sln300987/how-to-repair-the-efi-bootloader-on-a-gpt-hdd-for-windows-7--8--81-and-10-on-your-dell-pc?lang=en

- If that doesn't work, try upgrading Windows to the same version of Windows. (hopefully it will detect the old Windows, and reform the boot partition. I won't have my hopes up)