Windows no longer booting from drive after removing other one
Posted by BillionaireBear@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 6 comments
Hopefully my title describes my issue well enough, but I recently built a 2nd pc on Saturday and everything worked 100% fine. Built it, booted up, installed windows and games and tested it out. It's an all-white build, so I decided to paint the GPU backplate/shroud white as well afterwards - came out alright imo. Upon putting the GPU back in, AND taking out my 2nd ssd, my pc booted straight to BIOS and when I boot from there I see a black screen that asks me to insert proper drive and restart.
More specific: When I was building the pc, I occupied the primary m.2 slot with the brand new ssd, but I also had an older one on the secondary slot with a bunch of games I was trying to copy over, save time downloading. Both drives were installed at the time I first booted this system, also the Win 11 creation USB. I was fully aware of this, and do believe I selected the correct drive when installing windows; different drives/names/available storage space. When I first got into Windows, everything looked fine, my primary ssd was not named, basically fully available. My game storage drive was still named, was half full as expected, but it did have some Windows Recovery partition that I wasn't expecting since Windows was not supposed to be directly installed there, I formatted it before copying games to it. I believe I did boot the pc without the Win 11 USB plugged in at some point, but both hard drives installed. I've since put the 2nd drive back in but the same thing happens. BIOS does show both drives, but also some duplicate of the 2nd drive called Windows Boot Manager?
I'm fine with reinstalling Windows again, but I already activated it and am afraid I'll lose the license. I already tried reinstalling and using the same code but it says it no longer works, I stopped installation from there. Unfortunately I never backed up the image, and Windows Repair just does not work at all.
Parts list:
CPU - i5-12600K
Cooler - ID-COOLING SE-214-XT
Mobo - Gigabyte B660M AORUS Pro AX DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700
Ram - Timetec PINNACLE Konduit 16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR4-3200 CL16
SSD 1 - MSI SPATIUM M450 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 1TB
SSD 2 - Corsair MP600 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 1TB
GPU - XFX Speedster SWFT 309 Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 GB Video Card
Case - DIYPC ARGB-Q3 MicroATX Mini Tower Case
PSU - FSP Group Hydro G Pro 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX
Fans - Thermalright TL-C12C-S 66.17 CFM 120 mm Fans 3-Pack
OS - Windows 11 Home
Please let me know what might be best here. Again, no issue reinstalling Windows, but I'd like to use my same key I purchased if possible. Thanks
No_Agent4526@reddit
Reposting to reg comment outside of a chain, just in case reddit decides to bury it.
Found this on superuser, I edited so it's easier to understand and follow. It worked just fine for me. Basically in our cases the boot volume was on the drive removed. We need to get another one. This should work for windows 11. I don't see why it wouldn't.
To do fix our windows drive we need, 1. A USB drive with a windows 10 iso installed on it, open cmd 2. Use diskpart in cmd to make space. 3. Use diskpart to create a partition and format it into fat32. 4. Use bcdboot within that same cmd to create the boot files. 5. Done!
Boot with windows 10 USB / DVD etc. press shift+F10 on first screen. This will come up with command prompt. At command prompt run these commands.
& 3. Using diskpart to make space, create a partition
diskpart
list disk
select disk # (#, replace with 0, 1, 2 etc. put the # of the drive you are trying to fix, I recommend disconnecting other drives first)
list partition (There might be 1,2,3 etc listed. In my case there was only partition 1 and no unallocated space.)
select partition # (In my case partition 1, which ever partition is the primary with the largest amount of space)
shrink desired=500 (Making 500mb of space on the partition)
create partition efi (Making the new boot partition)
format quick fs=fat32 (Reformatting to the new partition to fat32)
list volume (write down your windows volume listed under Ltr. This is the drive that the windows is installed to that we are trying to fix, in my case C. If no letter is present that means it is unmounted, but it should be if you did the stuff above)
exit (exit from diskpart)
bcdboot X:\windows (In this case my drive letter was C before, replace X for whatever drive letter was shown in list volume)
exit (Closes cmd)
Safe-Sign-1059@reddit
What is the fix for someone that DOESN'T want to reinstall? I have far too much garbage to go though to just reinstall windows but I have the exact same issue. Got a Sabrent NVME and installed windows with a secondary m2 connected. When I remove the M2 i go straight to the bios but windows is on the NVME. Is there a way to repair or relocate the boot files that reside on the m2?
No_Agent4526@reddit
Found this on superuser, I edited so it's easier to understand and follow. It worked just fine for me. Basically in our cases the boot volume was on the drive removed. We need to get another one. This should work for windows 11. I don't see why it wouldn't.
To do fix our windows drive we need, 1. A USB drive with a windows 10 iso installed on it, open cmd 2. Use diskpart in cmd to make space. 3. Use diskpart to create a partition and format it into fat32. 4. Use bcdboot within that same cmd to create the boot files. 5. Done!
Boot with windows 10 USB / DVD etc. press shift+F10 on first screen. This will come up with command prompt. At command prompt run these commands.
& 3. Using diskpart to make space, create a partition
diskpart
list disk
select disk # (#, replace with 0, 1, 2 etc. put the # of the drive you are trying to fix, I recommend disconnecting other drives first)
list partition (There might be 1,2,3 etc listed. In my case there was only partition 1 and no unallocated space.)
select partition # (In my case partition 1, which ever partition is the primary with the largest amount of space)
shrink desired=500 (Making 500mb of space on the partition)
create partition efi (Making the new boot partition)
format quick fs=fat32 (Reformatting to the new partition to fat32)
list volume (write down your windows volume listed under Ltr. This is the drive that the windows is installed to that we are trying to fix, in my case C. If no letter is present that means it is unmounted, but it should be if you did the stuff above)
exit (exit from diskpart)
bcdboot X:\windows (In this case my drive letter was C before, replace X for whatever drive letter was shown in list volume)
exit (Closes cmd)
retracgib@reddit
I also have this problem... I don't want to lose everything on the OS drive...
BodybuilderOk2451@reddit
Did you already fix your issue? Can't you just repair Windows boot on the correct drive after booting from installation media. I've got the same issue, I'll try it soon.
retracgib@reddit
I wasn't able to get windows repair to work but YMMV.
I actually was able to follow some instructions from none other than ChatGPT to manually re-create my boot partition on an extra HDD I had sitting around. So, the HDD has the boot record and points to my actual OS drive. It's janky as hell, but I only needed access to the old OS temporarily, so it was fine by me.