New Hard drive - PC won't boot without old (non system) disk

gupott · 16 Sep 2018 at 11:51

Hi there,

I recently picked up a WD 10tb drive as I was hoping to retire at least one of my older legacy drives. I received the drive and copied across everything I wanted onto the new drive leaving nothing on my old 1tb Seagate drive. My system drive (with windows installed) is a Samsung SSD, so I didn't think i would have any problems when I unplugged the 1tb Seagate drive, but with it unplugged the PC won't boot. I have checked and double checked in the bios and I am sure it is set to boot from the Samsung. There is also nothing on the Seagate but the machine refuses to boot unless it is connected.

Anyone any ideas? Thanks.

gupott · 16 Sep 2018 at 12:38

The old drive (1tb Seagate) is not a system drive. I had some media stored on it, that was what has now been moved off to the new WD.

gupott · 16 Sep 2018 at 13:02

the Master Boot Record? How would I tell? Is there way to move it if it is?

gupott · 16 Sep 2018 at 13:44

No, well I get the mobo splash screen then it tries to boot and I get an error message. I plug the, in theory, blank disk back in and despite not even booting from it, the PC will start normally.

gupott · 16 Sep 2018 at 16:54

Ok, I might still have my windows 7 disk somewhere...

gupott · 16 Sep 2018 at 19:45

I have had a bit of route around in my man drawer (one of several). I have unearthed a windows 7 pro disk - although it does say something about being an upgrade disk. I have also found a windows 8 32b and 64b disks. I am thinking I should try the 64bit windows 8 disk first. Any thoughts, I can't see a key as of yet for the windows 8 disk although the windows 7 disk does have a product key.

I also had a look at all my drives in MiniTool Partition, it seems my current system disk is set as boot however the 1tb Seagate I am looking to retire is set to 'active & system'. I can actually change the active status with the tool but I think it may make things worse if I have misunderstood.

gupott · 17 Sep 2018 at 08:23

If you can set your boot drive to active that could be worth trying first,if it doesn't work try unplugging the 1tb and try again,if it still doesn't work either revert the changes or keep a written record of what you are doing.

My main worry here, is if I do this and get it wrong, then I won't be able to get into the machine to switch it back.

gupott · 29 Sep 2018 at 14:17

I have only just come back to this after getting my NAS set up. Anyway, I have tried a couple of things, both unsuccessful. Firstly I unplugged the 1TB drive and inserted my windows discs, and try as a I might, I could not get to the repair screen, so no luck there. Basically it won't boot successfully from the disc, I just get into a loop. Secondly, in Partition Wizard 10, I set the C: (where windows is installed) to active and rebooted. Nope, windows did not like that at all. I had to point the bios at the 1TB drive to get back into windows where I went back into partition wizard 10 to undo my mistake.

I am now wondering about setting up a windows flash drive and trying the boot fix commands as suggested by mattyfez.

Does anyone else have any thoughts?

gupott · 30 Sep 2018 at 09:02

I have made things worse!! I am typing from my old laptop.

I tried Hirens CD yesterday but to no avail. Currently when I turn the pc on it stops on Windows Boot Manager and says (abridged) Windows failed to start. File:\boot\BCD. Status:0xc0000098. Info The Boot Configuration Data file doesnt contain valid information for an operating system.

I am going to try again this morning what Mujja suggests. I will report back.

gupott · 30 Sep 2018 at 09:23

Just to confirm, this is not a new install but wanted to remove an empty old HDD from the system but couldn't boot without it despite it not being the windows install disk. Anyway, past that, as won't boot either way.

So this is what I have just done;

Installed Hirens BootCD PE Windows 10 and put onto USB
Went to the command prompt
used bootrec.exe /ScanOs to check windows install, confirmed on D:\
put in bcdboot d:\windows /s d: - Boot files successfully created. Shutdown and remove usb.
Restart and then exactly the same error message - dammit.

Any other suggestions?

gupott · 30 Sep 2018 at 09:43

A bit more digging around

If I try bcdboot c:\windows (checked that C: is correct on restart) get - failure when attempting to copy boot files
I then had another look around on the internet and tried the following bcdboot c:\windows /s c: /f ALL (/f all relates to UEFI, BIOS or ALL, I thought all sounded good) and it worked!

Thanks so much for the help and suggestions all!