Windows Boot Manager on wrong hard drive

[radiantai2001]

i think when i reinstalled windows a while back the boot manager got put on a different hard drive than the one i installed windows on, because when i take out my game storage drives and just have my ssd in, the computer won't boot, how do i fix this? 

[Willowwizard]

1 hour ago, mdthompson2001 said:

i think when i reinstalled windows a while back the boot manager got put on a different hard drive than the one i installed windows on, because when i take out my game storage drives and just have my ssd in, the computer won't boot, how do i fix this? 

Can you boot into the firmware/BIOS and see if the SSD is in the boot order?

If it's there but still doesn't boot, you'll have to reinstall the bootloader onto your SSD.

(If you only have an old-school BIOS, follow the instructions at the bottom of the page about repairing MBR,

if you have a newer motherboard with UEFI, follow the upper instructions)

(Guide is from Dell, however it applies to all Windows' based computers)

[radiantai2001]

18 hours ago, TakataruMC said:

Can you boot into the firmware/BIOS and see if the SSD is in the boot order?

If it's there but still doesn't boot, you'll have to reinstall the bootloader onto your SSD.

(If you only have an old-school BIOS, follow the instructions at the bottom of the page about repairing MBR,

if you have a newer motherboard with UEFI, follow the upper instructions)

(Guide is from Dell, however it applies to all Windows' based computers)

that guide required i have an efi partition, and im guessing that because i had an old hard drive that already had that partition in my pc when i installed windows the installer didn't bother putting it on my ssd.

 

here's the guides i used to get it working again:

https://winaero.com/blog/shrink-partition-windows-10/ i used this guide to shrink the os partition in command prompt after booting from a windows 10 install disk (just choose repair my pc, go to troubleshooting and open command prompt)

https://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/241974-system-wont-boot-after-removing-second-hard-drive-efi.html?s=22be685f3a6cb670307037a38c15ea06 then i used saltgrass's second post in this forum thread to make a new efi boot partition (the partition shrink was to make room for this)

 

after that everything worked fine, hopefully this is helpful to anyone else in the same situation