Starnge System disk problem?

[Admiral Huddy]

But stuck here.

I have three internal drives:

1. 120 GB SSD (C)
2. 1TB HDD (D)
3. 500GB back drive (Z)


I installed windows on the SSD.. Works fine

but the Back drive (Z) is showing as a system disk under device manager?

How come?

The problem i have is that if i disconnect the Z drive, the system fails to boot and when i go to create a system image, the both C and Z are highlight for backup.

The C: drive seems to be reliant on the Z drive, which is rather worrying.

AHCi mode set.


Any ideas?

 

[Admiral Huddy]

Chhers guys.. Manged to get to the bottom of this.

I think wazza is spot on.. It turns out with the new EFI boards, the windows installation creates an EFI partition as well as a MBR partition. Interestingly, the MBR is created on the selected drive. In my case, the SSD but the EFI partition is created on the first HDD it finds in the Boot priority regardless of the partition you selected for Windows to be loaded.. This means your installation is split over two drives.

Why is this a problem? When I tried disconnecting this drive windows wouldn't boot.. So the boot process is completely dependent on this EFI partition. .. So if that drive fails where the EFI sits.. or isn't available .. your stuffed..

Also, when creating an image of the Windows partition, it automatically selected "System" partitions but in doing so selected the entire backup drive which wasn't much use.

The only way round this was to reinstall Windows with all the other drives disconnected (as stated above) or making sure the boot priority is correct in the first place. As far as i can see, you can't select which drives the EFI partition is created on. I choose the former just to be sure. Windows 7 created the MBR and EFI partitions on the SSD as expected.