Win10 Not Booting after removing second SSD

[Shiv78]

Hey guys, been a pretty long time since I was last on here.

 

So, I have a PC (specs in sig) which had Windows 7 installed on a 250GB SSD. It got kind of full, and I wanted Windows 10, so I got a 500GB SSD and installed win10 on it. I was able to dual boot either one, so everything was fine. 

However, yesterday I wanted to put that old 250gb SSD into my laptop, but when I removed the 250GB SSD, I became unable to boot Windows (it's first in the BIOS boot order). Even forcing the BIOS to boot straight off the 500gb SSD didn't work.

 

However, if I plug the old SSD back in and then boot off of it, the bootloader comes back and I can select Windows 10 and use it normally. I assume that some kind of boot files or a special partition exists on the old drive which is required for the new drive to boot Win10.

 

How do I get the PC to still boot Windows 10 even without the old one?

Thanks in advance.

[Ashleyyyy]

Windows 10 is a mess in terms of where it puts the boot loader. i have 3 240GB ssd's in my machine, and even though i only selected one of them for install, it put the bootloader on a different drive than the one i selected. 

 

so yeah you're not the only one with this problem... 

[rcmaehl]

You'll want use a recovery CD or USB with the drive and use bootrec to create a new bootloader on the drive.

[Syntaxvgm]

Make a windows 10 flash, boot it, go to recovery options. Open a command prompt, and rebuilt the boot loader. 

 bootrec /rebuildbcd

should do it, but check with some guides online and try a few things if it doesn't work. 

[SupaKomputa]

Yes the boot record is on the 1st drive, if you removed it you won't get to boot windows on the new drive.

This is not a bug, is just the way it is done.

You need a bootloader on the new drive to be able to boot on it.

Since it is a new drive, just reinstall fresh without hooking the old drive.

[Shiv78]

26 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

You'll want use a recovery CD or USB with the drive and use bootrec to create a new bootloader on the drive.

 

21 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

Make a windows 10 flash, boot it, go to recovery options. Open a command prompt, and rebuilt the boot loader. 

 bootrec /rebuildbcd

should do it, but check with some guides online and try a few things if it doesn't work. 

Thanks, will try this later. Sounds promising

20 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Yes the boot record is on the 1st drive, if you removed it you won't get to boot windows on the new drive.

This is not a bug, is just the way it is done.

You need a bootloader on the new drive to be able to boot on it.

Since it is a new drive, just reinstall fresh without hooking the old drive.

It's not a completely new drive anymore, I've been using this install for 5 or 6 months now. For some reason the whole OS is on the newer drive but the bootloader is on the older one

[GER_T4IGA]

if you install windows: only have the drive you want the boot loader on physically connected. Connect the other drives later one

 

Windows is a POS!

[SupaKomputa]

11 minutes ago, Shiv78 said:

 

Thanks, will try this later. Sounds promising

It's not a completely new drive anymore, I've been using this install for 5 or 6 months now. For some reason the whole OS is on the newer drive but the bootloader is on the older one

Is not "for some reason". When you have 2 OS on the same drive, the bootloader would be installed on the 1st drive.

You can see both OS from that bootloader and select which one you want to boot.

If you have only 1 OS then the bootloader would skip the drive selector.

 

If you move / remove the 1st drive then the second cannot be booted because there's no bootloader.

To fix this you must rebuild the bootloader, i would not suggest this as you may endup reformat the drive mistakenly.

What i would do is backup all important files on the ssd, and then start from scratch.

 

After this you can only boot on each drive separately.

To do this you can select the drive you want to boot in bios (in my case press F9 then select the disk).

[Shiv78]

2 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

You'll want use a recovery CD or USB with the drive and use bootrec to create a new bootloader on the drive.

 

2 hours ago, Syntaxvgm said:

Make a windows 10 flash, boot it, go to recovery options. Open a command prompt, and rebuilt the boot loader. 

 bootrec /rebuildbcd

should do it, but check with some guides online and try a few things if it doesn't work. 

Worked guys, thanks!