System Files on secondary drive?

drg889

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Feb 4, 2010
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Hi everyone,

I recently rebuilt my computer after getting a new GPU (been a couple years since it was last dusted), and when i plugged it all in, i started to get weird issues with my primary drive (SSD) not booting up, essentially, windows wasn't detected (i assumed it was corrupt), but i could access all the files on it fine when i booted with a secondary drive. After doing a ton of "fixes" including bootrec in command, startup repair, and other things, i finally go it to work, but i noticed in disk management, my secondary drive (HDD) is "Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition), where as my SSD is (Boot/page file/active/crash/primary)"

If i try to make the storage drive inactive or something, or boot with only the SSD, i get "BOOTMGR is missing, press cntrl alt dlt to restart"

now im wondering how do i essentially make everything in windows and and system files to be on my primary drive? No matter what ive tried (rebuild mbr, chkdsk, etc.) i always end up getting bootmgr is missing when i try booting with only my ssd.

any solutions would be great, startup repair and bootrec commands haven't helped much yet...

thanks!
 
Windows is a bit confusing on this. "SYSTEM" means the boot loader where as "BOOT" means the OS drive. Do as bgunner suggests to fix it. In order to avoid this in the future, make sure only the drive you want to install the OS onto is connected during the OS install. After the OS install, attach all remaining drives. This forces windows to put the boot loader and OS onto the same drive.