Computer no longer recognizing SSD as a valid boot drive

paulHarkonen

Honorable
Dec 1, 2013
3
0
10,510
Hey all,
So the situation is fairly straightforward (I think). I removed two existing hard drives with data only on them (no windows files) and replaced them with three new drives which I configured as a RAID through the motherboard\BIOS. I did not touch my SSD which has the windows installation on it (windows 7). After doing my installation and setting up the RAID the computer no longer acknowledges as a valid boot drive.

I verified that the drive shows up on the BIOS, I verified that it is not the RAID (by removing the RAID from the system, still doesn't recognize it). I booted up from an Ubuntuu flash drive to verify I can still access the drive. All of the files appear to be there from the windows installation, including the bootmgr.exe files. I tried a windows repair from the install disk and did not locate a valid windows boot drive even after running the repair tool. For now, I'm just going to reinstall windows cleanly on a different disk (because I'm tired of the hassle of dealing with it and I have everything backed up already) but I'm very curious what might have caused the issue given that all of the data on the drive is still intact, and accessible through a linux boot.

 
Solution
Is your primary boot drive plugged into SATA-0? If it isn't then your motherboard won't recognize it as the primary boot device and it's most likely that something got crossed when you hooked up the other drives. If you set your primary SSD as the main boot device, then go into the BIOS and set your drives according to the ports they're hooked up to you should be good.

g-unit1111

Titan
Moderator
Is your primary boot drive plugged into SATA-0? If it isn't then your motherboard won't recognize it as the primary boot device and it's most likely that something got crossed when you hooked up the other drives. If you set your primary SSD as the main boot device, then go into the BIOS and set your drives according to the ports they're hooked up to you should be good.
 
Solution

paulHarkonen

Honorable
Dec 1, 2013
3
0
10,510


I tried using it as the only drive in the system (removed all other drives) and I verified that it showed up as the primary boot device (including going into the BIOS to force it to boot from that drive). These didn't change anything unfortunately.