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SSD ONLY boots with hard drive plugged in?

Luke
By Luke
in Troubleshooting
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So this is a weird one. I built a PC for a friend and have a 240GB SSD and a 1TB HDD but i decided to remove the HDD and now the SSD will not boot alone for some reason. I get the "Reboot and select proper Boot Device" message when only the SSD is installed but when the HDD is installed as a secondary drive it works fine. I'm 100% sure that Windows is installed on the SSD and i've tried different SATA ports, SATA cables and SATA power cables but this problem seems to persist. Any ideas? I have the strong feeling that if i installed Windows with only the SSD installed it wouldn't be causing this issue when i remove/add other drives.

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4 minutes ago, Luke said:

So this is a weird one. I built a PC for a friend and have a 240GB SSD and a 1TB HDD but i decided to remove the HDD and now the SSD will not boot alone for some reason. I get the "Reboot and select proper Boot Device" message when only the SSD is installed but when the HDD is installed as a secondary drive it works fine. I'm 100% sure that Windows is installed on the SSD and i've tried different SATA ports, SATA cables and SATA power cables but this problem seems to persist. Any ideas? I have the strong feeling that if i installed Windows with only the SSD installed it wouldn't be causing this issue when i remove/add other drives.

Try reinstalling Windows again without the HDD attached.
Maybe the UEFI/Windows Boot Manager was installed elsewhere.

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This happened to me once. The Windows boot manager got installed on the second drive instead of on the same drive as the OS.

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This happens when you install windows on the SSD without unplugging the hard drive.

The only fix is to reinstall windows, and this time make sure ONLY the SSD is plugged in.

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windows has this amazing tendency to put the bootloader in places where you dont want it.

 

its why i always recommend you install windows with nothing plugged in but the media you're installing from, and the media you're installing to.

 

you can move the bootloader, but it is actually more work than just to reinstall windows.

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