Computer won't boot with second HDD connected

DebussySlayer · Oct 17, 2015

Okay so the story is, yesterday my computer randomly decided it wouldn't load past the bios splash screen. After unplugging a few things I isolated the issue down to my secondary hard drive, a Seagate Barracuda 1TB hard drive which I purchased a few months back and has been working perfectly up until now. I have tried entering the BIOS to change the boot order but if the secondary hard drive is plugged into a SATA port at all my computer will do nothing and stay on the BIOS splash screen regardless of how much I mash F11. I have tried entering the BIOS with the secondary hard drive unplugged to try to change the boot order but it doesn't show up at all, also tried plugging it into different SATA ports but no luck. I managed to hot plug the secondary hard drive while windows was loading which worked, I was able to access the second hard drive and copy all of my files from it so I know it's not dead. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I'm all out of ideas

Boogieman_WD · Oct 19, 2015

Hey there, DebussySlayer.

When you installed your OS, did you have all other drives disconnected from the motherboard during the installation process, except for the one you were installing Windows to? Sometimes when there's more than one drive connected, during the installation process, some files may be written on the second HDD and thus some conflicts like the one you're having may arise. On the other hand, this might be due to a mobo problem, although in order to check this out, you'd have to find a different drive, so that you can test it along with your OS drive, to see if you can boot to Windows properly. Other than that, I'd suggest that you do the trick where you're able to boot to Windows and connect the secondary HDD afterwards, so that it is visible by Disk Management. Then download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostics tool and run the tests on it, to see if anything alarming pops-up.

Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD

DebussySlayer · Oct 21, 2015

Hey there Boogieman_WD, I've since fixed the problem by hot plugging the second hard drive while booting windows so that it was accessible in windows then by formatting the 2nd drive. Restarted my computer with both drives connected and bam, problem solved. Must have been some files on the second hard drive that were interfering with windows start up

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Computer won't boot with second HDD connected

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