Must have 2 drives connected to boot Windows 10?

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7th1rt3en

Commendable
Aug 21, 2016
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1,510
My computer was running a 240gb SSD for the OS with a 1tb HDD for file storage. I decided to install a new 960gb SSD as the primary drive for the OS and all of my steam/oculus games. To do this I attempted to clone the old SSD to the new SSD, which ended up not being bootable. I tried several times but in the end I gave up. Afterwards. looking at the disk management utility, I noticed that the large HDD was being used by the system. I decided to power down and disable that drive via BIOS to see if the computer would boot with just the old SSD, to my surprise the computer would not. To make a long story short my computer will only boot in a specific configuration, with the original SSD and HDD connected and booting from the HDD. Windows is actually installed on the old SSD and I believe it WAS booting from there previously, but I could be wrong. I now have the new SSD disconnected until I figure this out.

If I try to boot with just the old SSD (C), I get a black screen with "0xc000000f" error stating "The Boot configuration data for your PC is missing or contains errors".

If I try to boot with just the HDD (D) I get a blue recovery screen with "0xc000000e" error stating "A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed.

I'm just trying to determine the exact problem so I can find out if it can be fixed without a fresh install. If I have to do a fresh install it will be a huge pain,. It seems like the boot data is on D drive and the windows files on C drive. Anyway to move the boot data? I want the C drive to be the only drive required to boot. I'll install my new SSD as a third drive later. All drives are MBR and connected via Sata 3.

Please let me know if you need more info.

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Solution
SkyNetRising

1. Order of partitions is not critical. If all of them are of primary type, then what matters is, which of them is active (bootloader partition needs to be active).
2. You can keep the recovery partition, some recovery environment files are there.
3. Preferable - yes, slightly quicker - yes, but not by much (couple of seconds maybe).
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SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

Titan
Jan 4, 2016
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Bootloader is located in System Reserved partition on HDD.
Windows is located in C: on SSD.

To migrate to new 960GB SSD, you'll need to:
1. clone System reserved partition to new SSD, make it active;
2. clone C: partition to new SSD;
3. boot from windows installation media, when only new SSD is connected;
4. fix mbr, bootloader, bcd store as described in that link in @Colif post.
 
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7

7th1rt3en

Commendable
Aug 21, 2016
3
0
1,510
Thank you for the suggestions. Actually, I mentioned in my post that I will go ahead and leave the OS on the old 240gb SSD and install the new SSD as a 3rd drive later. So from your answers I would just need to clone the system reserved partition from the HDD to the old SSD and do some repairs with only the old SSD connected. So I have two questions about that. Would the order of the partitions matter when I clone? Do I need to keep the recovery partition on the old SSD?

Isn't it generally preferable to have the bootloader on the SSD? It seems like it would be slightly quicker to boot, but maybe its a waste of time and I should just leave it like it is.
 
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SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

Titan
Jan 4, 2016
29,864
3,853
111,640

1. Order of partitions is not critical. If all of them are of primary type, then what matters is, which of them is active (bootloader partition needs to be active).
2. You can keep the recovery partition, some recovery environment files are there.
3. Preferable - yes, slightly quicker - yes, but not by much (couple of seconds maybe).
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
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