Partitions and drives

dante6491 · 4 Jan 2021 at 09:21

A bit of preamble.

For a number of weeks I have been trying to convert an MBR based NVME SSD to GPT (on the basis I will need to turn off CSM on my motherboard to turn on AMD SAM once released by Asrock).

During the course of my tweaking, I may have deleted a system reserved partition and caused some general mayhap. The end result is I needed to reinstall W10 yesterday, which unfortunately appears to have gone wrong.

When looking at Disk Manager my (NVME boot) C: drive is shown as "Healthy (Boot, page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)" and the backup drive (SATA3 SSD) as "Healthy (System, active, primary partition)". The end result is that I now cannot boot without having both drives plugged in (not an issue) but I still cannot convert the boot drive to GPT as the "system" is on the other hard drive.

My gut feeling is that I need to install W10 again with all other drives apart from the NVME SSD installed, but I would be grateful if anyone could talk me through another fix. I have tried bootrec.exe and a repair of W10 using a recovery drive.

Thank you

Alec

wolfie138 · 4 Jan 2021 at 10:24

i have heard on other forums that you should never install w/ more than one drive as Windows will randomly put stuff on the other drive. if you disconnect all but your C drive and retry you should be fine. the options you pick when doing the install will determine if it gets set up as MBR or GPT as i recall.

dante6491 · 4 Jan 2021 at 15:58

wolfie138 said:
i have heard on other forums that you should never install w/ more than one drive as Windows will randomly put stuff on the other drive. if you disconnect all but your C drive and retry you should be fine. the options you pick when doing the install will determine if it gets set up as MBR or GPT as i recall.

Thank you. Rather confirmed my suspicion. Will dig out the old WD mybook and make some backups...

dante6491 · 11 Jan 2021 at 11:52

As a bit of an update, after a fair bit of hoop jumping managed to get a GPT partition working and CSM turned off in the bios.

Discovered that creating a bootable W10 drive through windows with MBR created a boot drive install with MBR by default. I therefore ended up using Rufus to create a GPT boot record. All working. All files backed up and restored. Windows boots even quicker.