Windows Won't load without Both HHD connected

maklabouhlel · 15 Nov 2019 at 19:54

My brother gave me a dell machine to install an ssd. It's a rather old machine from around 2010. He inherited it when he took over a liquidated fork lift truck company. He doesn't want to replace it with a new machine because it has some expensive software on it which he would have to repurchase.

There's two HDDs inside and is not in raid mode. Windows 7 was only showing a single hdd because the other one had its letter removed. I re-added the letter and it seems to be empty. The problem I'm having is Windows won't load unless both HDDs are installed. Could there be any reason for this? I think it initially had XP on it.

Steampunk · 15 Nov 2019 at 20:26

If you look at the disks in diskmgmt.msc, you'll probably find you've got the primary partition on one drive, and the boot partition on the other, so you need both drives to get the machine up. The simplest way to fix it is to unplug all the other drives and re-install onto the one connected drive.

There are other ways to fix this, (such as editing the bootloader or messing about with repair disks or diskpart), but it's pretty fiddly and prone to giving you problems if you get it wrong. Last time I had a similar issue, I had one drive that would boot but had nothing on it, and another that had all my data but wouldn't boot. It took a lot of messing about and careful thinking ahead to rationalise the two together to make sure I wasn't deleting the wrong thing.

maklabouhlel · 15 Nov 2019 at 20:32

Steampunk said:
If you look at the disks in diskmgmt.msc, you'll probably find you've got the primary partition on one drive, and the boot partition on the other, so you need both drives to get the machine up. The simplest way to fix it is to unplug all the other drives and re-install onto the one connected drive.

There are other ways to fix this, (such as editing the bootloader or messing about with repair disks or diskpart), but it's pretty fiddly and prone to giving you problems if you get it wrong. Last time I had a similar issue, I had one drive that would boot but had nothing on it, and another that had all my data but wouldn't boot. It took a lot of messing about and careful thinking ahead to rationalise the two together to make sure I wasn't deleting the wrong thing.

Re-install is not an option unfortunately as one of the software costs over £1000. Would cloning both drives onto 2 SSDs work?

bremen1874 · 15 Nov 2019 at 20:37

Why not leave the other drive connected? It isn’t going to hurt anything.

maklabouhlel · 15 Nov 2019 at 20:48

bremen1874 said:
Why not leave the other drive connected? It isn’t going to hurt anything.

Good point.

andy_mk3 · 15 Nov 2019 at 20:48

Macrium Reflect Free (a bootable tool), has an option to fix windows boot issues. Disconnect all but the SSD, boot into Reflect from a USB/CD and follow this: http://reflect.macrium.com/help/v5/rescue_cds/fix_boot_problems.htm

Steampunk · 15 Nov 2019 at 20:49

maklabouhlel said:
Re-install is not an option unfortunately as one of the software costs over £1000. Would cloning both drives onto 2 SSDs work?

Probably, but it depends if your software is somehow tied/licenced to that hardware. You can clone to two new drives, but you might not get the software running if it doesn't allow that much hardware changing.

If you're going to get new drives and are willing to experiment, I'd certainly do a bit of googling and see if you can copy the old partitions to a new drive set up correctly. It's the same problem people get when they have dual boot systems with the boot partition on one drive, and a second OS on a second drive that isn't bootable. There are ways to copy the booting partition over to the second drive.

FatRakoon · 8 Dec 2019 at 20:57

Its probably got the Boot sector on Drive 1 but the O/S on Drive 0
Just reinstall with only the one Drive, connected to SATA 0 and that way you know that it only needs the one drive?
The BIOS might have been set to boot from the second disk and it does that, but the Frist disk has the C: on.

Happens all the time if its not been installed properly.

IAmATeaf · 13 Dec 2019 at 13:04

FatRakoon said:
Its probably got the Boot sector on Drive 1 but the O/S on Drive 0
Just reinstall with only the one Drive, connected to SATA 0 and that way you know that it only needs the one drive?
The BIOS might have been set to boot from the second disk and it does that, but the Frist disk has the C: on.

Happens all the time if its not been installed properly.

^ This. Have had the same happen to me before. I would reinstall Windows with just the SSD installed, then after the OS is on and boots with no issues, attach each drive in turn to retrieve any data you may want off the drives, then format both drives in turn before restoring the data back on to the newly formatted drive.

maklabouhlel · 13 Dec 2019 at 14:25

IAmATeaf said:
^ This. Have had the same happen to me before. I would reinstall Windows with just the SSD installed, then after the OS is on and boots with no issues, attach each drive in turn to retrieve any data you may want off the drives, then format both drives in turn before restoring the data back on to the newly formatted drive.

Clean install was not an option, hence the post.

APM · 13 Dec 2019 at 16:07

Do a clone of the working system to a new drive using macrium reflect,then plug that in (by itself) and see if it works ok,then if you decide to keep that as the working drive do another clone as a back up.

maklabouhlel · 13 Dec 2019 at 16:12

APM said:
Do a clone of the working system to a new drive using macrium reflect,then plug that in (by itself) and see if it works ok,then if you decide to keep that as the working drive do another clone as a back up.

I already sorted it. I just cloned the main drive to a ssd and left the boot drive. All has been working fine for almost a month now.