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Lost Boot Drives on two separate PC's

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wik007

PCHF Member
Oct 3, 2020
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#1
Hi,
I have two PCs in the house, one is my personal work/gaming rig, and one is for others to use.

My rig runs windows 10 from an 512GB NVME drive (boot drive), and has a 120GB SSD (Work) and a 1TB SSD (games, files, etc). The second PC has a 1TB HDD (boot drive).

The second one had an update not long ago, and from there it couldn't boot windows, I assumed it was a HDD file structure failure or a complete HDD failure. I tried the windows repair tool and it just said that nothing could be done.

As I had a spare SSD in my rig (Work), I decided to drop that into the other PC, except I pulled the wrong SSD out, I realised this when I was in the Windows installer and it showed a 1TB SSD instead of a 120GB SSD. Whoops my bad, easy, just swap it back to the other PC right?

Well apparently not, because as soon as I swapped it back to my rig, all of a sudden, my boot drive cant be found on my rig (the NVME that never got touched).

I have unplugged the 1TB SSD and any external drives and even re-seated the NVME in case something happened. This hasn't resolved the issue.

My rig also underwent an update this morning, but had been started a couple of times since without issue. Only after I put this SSD back into it.

Does anyone have any idea of what the issue may be?
 
#2
at a guess, was the NVMe drive added after any of the others drives and one of those originally had Windows installed, and then when you installed the NVMe, you then put Windows on that?

or in short, although the NVMe was the boot drive, the boot partition was actually on another drive which you took at and did something to, effectively destroying what was the boot partition for your work PC.

it's a little mucking around, but between BCDEDIT and DISKPART you should be able to make the NVMe the active, bootable, system drive.
of course, removing all drives and just having the NVMe in and doing a repair reload of Windows should also achieve the same result.

either way, be sure to have a backup on hand prior to fiddling with this sort of stuff.
 
#3
The NVME drive was always part of the original system, but what you are saying does sort of make sense and rings a bell. I think the SSD I took out of the PC had a system partition on it from the original windows install some 2 years ago, so you are quite likely correct in that I may have destroyed the boot partition. Didn't think that would have happened.

No matter, I am in the process of 'trying' to reinstall/repair windows. I'm just having an issue now where the installer stalls out while trying to load the installer files.

Thanks for the heads up.
 
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