Starnge System disk problem?

Admiral Huddy · 28 Sep 2012 at 12:33

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?

Divx · 28 Sep 2012 at 12:50

just a stab in the dark, but did you have the drive connected up when you installed windows on the ssd?
Not sure if its still the case, but i've heard that windows will install some files on your hard drive if you have it connected at the same time when installing. (you probably know this though).

skyripper · 28 Sep 2012 at 12:55

Most likely down to the order of ports (0-4 etc.) each drive is connected to and then the windows install disk looking for an existing MBR before making a new one.

Or something like that.

Should be able to disconnect the one you want, throw in a Win7 DVD and use FixBoot.

wazza300 · 28 Sep 2012 at 13:00

your windows install has probably included some data on the other drives in the boot record

best way is to always unplug any un needed drives and just have the hdd/ssd plugged in that you want to install windows on,once done plug the other drives back in

you can try unplugging the z drive and pop in your windows disk,boot from it and do a startup repair,that should fix things

Admiral Huddy · 1 Oct 2012 at 09:09

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.

wazza300 · 1 Oct 2012 at 11:47

i have no idea why it does it but it does,even on non uefi boards,best and safest way is to just have the one drive you intend installing windows on connected,once done add in any additional hdd's/ssd's