Strange Things With Drive Booting

[PCSarge]

i'm running an ASUS B550-I ROG Strix 

 

the M.2_1 slot (gen 4) has a sabrent rocket 500GB SSD in it with windows installed, but it wont boot from that drive.

 

the M.2_2 slot has an old WD blue SATA SSD in it, that somehow ended up being the UEFI windows boot manager, but contains no windows install what so ever? its literally a downloads and documents storage drive

 

why this is very STRANGE TO ME is when i installed windows 10, the only drive connected to my motherboard was the sabrent rocket in M.2_1

 

is there a possible way to fix this without reinstalling windows? i've tried disabling the WD and booting to the sabrent drive, and it just says no bootable drive.

[Avacado]

36 minutes ago, PCSarge said:

i'm running an ASUS B550-I ROG Strix 

 

the M.2_1 slot (gen 4) has a sabrent rocket 500GB SSD in it with windows installed, but it wont boot from that drive.

 

the M.2_2 slot has an old WD blue SATA SSD in it, that somehow ended up being the UEFI windows boot manager, but contains no windows install what so ever? its literally a downloads and documents storage drive

 

why this is very STRANGE TO ME is when i installed windows 10, the only drive connected to my motherboard was the sabrent rocket in M.2_1

 

is there a possible way to fix this without reinstalling windows? i've tried disabling the WD and booting to the sabrent drive, and it just says no bootable drive.

Have you swapped the drive locations? You are able to see both drives when IN windows? It is quite strange. If it were me I would clear cmos/secure boot keys and try again. I know you said you don't want to do that, but I don't have any other suggestions. 

[PCSarge]

1 hour ago, Avacado said:

Have you swapped the drive locations? You are able to see both drives when IN windows? It is quite strange. If it were me I would clear cmos/secure boot keys and try again. I know you said you don't want to do that, but I don't have any other suggestions. 

both drives funtion normally in windows, the rear board M.2_2 slot is SATA only, so sadly swapping isnt an option. i find it strange that boot manager didnt end up on the windows install drive

[UltraMega]

IDK why the boot manager sometimes goes to a different drive when you install windows with more than one drive installed but its super annoying. I usually install windows with only one drive installed for this reason. 

[tictoc]

You should be able to boot from a Windows iso and fix it with Start Up Repair.

[PCSarge]

9 hours ago, tictoc said:

You should be able to boot from a Windows iso and fix it with Start Up Repair.

 

i actually remembered the old bcdboot command line saand used that to create an EFI partition on my drive, incase anyone needs it ill post it here:

 

Run the following commands in command prompt and click enter at the end of each:

• Diskpart

• List disk

• Select disk

• Select Partition(the one on your OS drive you are borrowing space from, you only need 100MB)

• shrink partition=500

• Create partition efi

• Format quick fs=fat32

• List partition

• List volume (i.e. the volume letter where the Windows OS is installed)

• Exit

• bcdboot X:/windows /s Y:(Replace "X" with the Volume letter of the Windows OS partition and "Y" with your new EFI Partition).

• Reboot your PC and change your bios to boot from your OS drive.

Edited August 26, 2021 by PCSarge

[Diffident]

On 25/08/2021 at 17:36, UltraMega said:

IDK why the boot manager sometimes goes to a different drive when you install windows with more than one drive installed but its super annoying. I usually install windows with only one drive installed for this reason. 

 

Windows installs the boot loader to the "first" drive in sequential order.  If you have 6 SATA ports labeled 1 through 6 and you have drives connected to port 2 and port 5, windows will install the boot loader to the drive connected to port 2.  When connecting drives always put the OS drive in port 1, or port 0 depending on what nomenclature your board uses. 

 

If you have a mixture of NVME and SATA drives, the NVME drive will be considered "first".

Edited August 26, 2021 by Diffident

[schuck6566]

I know this is an old thread, but I recently had an issue where my comp was running fine,had updated the bios, ran it with the new bios for several days,then after a windows update BAM it couldn't find my OS. It showed the drive, but had changed the data about what all was on it and boot order in the bios. I finally swapped it to the other NVME slot in case it was an issue with the primary and it read it properly again,BUT it shows the old bios ver again. had updated from ver.31 to 40,to 50. ran ver.50 with no issues until this happened. Gonna put the drive back into the primary slot after the holidays and see if it works in there again.

[schuck6566]

On 25/11/2021 at 09:06, schuck6566 said:

I know this is an old thread, but I recently had an issue where my comp was running fine,had updated the bios, ran it with the new bios for several days,then after a windows update BAM it couldn't find my OS. It showed the drive, but had changed the data about what all was on it and boot order in the bios. I finally swapped it to the other NVME slot in case it was an issue with the primary and it read it properly again,BUT it shows the old bios ver again. had updated from ver.31 to 40,to 50. ran ver.50 with no issues until this happened. Gonna put the drive back into the primary slot after the holidays and see if it works in there again.

Update:After purchasing new larger drive for christmas present, I used Acronis true image to transfer the data from the old smaller drive to the new drive in the original faster slot. After transfering,I removed the old drive completely,switched the bios BACK to booting from the faster slot(it showed the new drive no issue) and booted with no problems and have been running for a couple of weeks now. NOW I have to see about updating the bios again.Guess maybe I'll go slower with that this time.

[Mr. Fox]

All of my systems are multi-boot and I want each OS to have its own functional Windows or Linux bootloader. I disable the extra SATA and NVMe drives in the BIOS when installing an OS and then there is no opportunity for anything to happen that is inconsistent with my wishes. I then use the BIOS boot selection hotkey during POST to select the OS I want to use. Grub2 does a much better job of handling a multi-boot OS scenario than Windows does, but it is a much better option to control it in a more mechanical fashion that is OS agnostic.