Windows 8 didn't like hard drive swap

[markweatherill]

I was trying to diagnose a faulty SATA hard drive from a laptop.

I thought I'd unplug one of my hard drives and connect the faulty hard drive, and see if I could read it. Windows wouldn't boot. And no, it wasn't the C drive I disconnected.
After some playing with a floppy disk based recovery tool to no avail I removed the faulty drive and reconnected the original drive, only to find that Windows 8 started up and promptly did a System Restore.
After a long time, it started Windows and everything seems to be OK.

But this wouldn't have been a problem with XP, I'm sure!

Is this something to do with the way Windows 8 saves its state on shutdown, and getting upset when things aren't the same on next boot??

 

[bimmerboii]

I did this on my win8 laptop. Removed the ssd where win8 was installed, but back the original hdd which has win7. Booted up fine. Removed the hdd and put back the ssd and also booted up win8 no problem.

 

[Crowort]

I'd guess the drive you removed had the master boot record on it. All flavours of windows I've used are bad for doing things like this unless you install it with only the drive the windows partition will be on connected.

 

[Glaucus]

I'd guess the drive you removed had the master boot record on it. All flavours of windows I've used are bad for doing things like this unless you install it with only the drive the windows partition will be on connected.

This.

I haven't had any issues swapping drives about on w8.
But I always make sure the OS drive is plugged into sata1mobo connector and has the boot record on it.

 

[Raumarik]

Only problems i've had with Windows 8 drive swapping is Bitlocker needing to be calm down afterwards, hardly a bit hassle though. Swap another drive to see if it's the MBR drive you've pulled as suggested by Crowort.

 

[hyperst]

I went to update my bios, hit restart and then entered BIOS, now it refused to update if my BIOS was on c drive, it just told me it was not a valid BIOS file, ok I thought, exit the BIOS and go and check the file, at that point the spinning circle load up just froze and refused to boot to windows, it just sat there, ended up powering off completely and back on, So it then boots up fine, did this a few times as I tried a re-download of the BIOS, tried it in different places, desktop, a folder on the desktop and such stuff, but it would never accept it as a valid BIOS and windows would always freeze upon exiting and loading windows, only way around it was to use a USB drive, weird.

 

[bledd]

Rule of thumb when installing Windows

Put the drive you want to run Windows from on Port 0, disconnect all other drives for the initial install.

Prevents any problems like this arising.

 

[markweatherill]

Thanks all, I reckon the drive I disconnected did have a MBR on it although I thought it would default to the C: drive.