HDD Disappearing after restart

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
V

Viktor_21

Prominent
May 12, 2017
14
0
510
Hello everyone!

Bought a new SSD, installed in place of my optical drive on my laptop, HDD has not been removed.
Installed Windows 10 Pro 64 on the SSD, made it bootable - all good. The issue comes after logging in to windows, the HDD disappears from MY PC. It does appear in Disk Management and am able to assign drive letter and path however, once done, after a restart I am forced to assign them again as it disappears.
What could be the reason behind this?

Both the SSD and the HDD are set as Primary partitions if that is of any importance.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

Titan
Jan 4, 2016
29,854
3,853
111,640
Well - SSD is not bootable. Bootloader is located on HDD and your system boots from it.
If you removed HDD, your system would not boot.

Anyway - that shouldn't be a reason for disappearing of assigned drive letters.
Does that happen also if you assign any other letter (not F: )?

What happens if you create empty folder C:\storage and mount your F: drive to this folder?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
V

Viktor_21

Prominent
May 12, 2017
14
0
510


I did try with other letters, same thing.
Just had an update from Windows and had to restart, the HDD is gone again, I've attached screenshots of My PC and Disk Management.

https://imgur.com/a/0C9XU


Havent tried mounting F in a folder, will try altho I would prefer it showing up in My PC as a separate drive..
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
V

Viktor_21

Prominent
May 12, 2017
14
0
510
Downloaded EaseUS Partition Master 12.8, apparently the HDD was set as Hidden reversed that and it assigned itself automatically.

You did mention the SSD is not bootable? How come, I do have it as fist option in BIOS.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
V

Viktor_21

Prominent
May 12, 2017
14
0
510


How do I get my SSD to be bootable then? Should I check in with the BIOS?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

Titan
Jan 4, 2016
29,854
3,853
111,640
You'd have to create EFI system partition on SSD.
You can do that with diskpart command (from elevated command prompt).
  • diskpart
    select disk 0
    select partition 1
    shrink desired=100
    create partition efi
    format fs=fat32
    assign letter=x
    exit
    bcdboot c:\windows /s x:
After that shutdown your system, disconnect HDD,
boot up your system and verify, it can boot with only ssd connected.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
V

Viktor_21

Prominent
May 12, 2017
14
0
510


Will give this a try however, given that I am on a laptop, I will probably pass on the part of disconnecting the HDD.

I did went into the BIOS and tried setting the SSD as 1st boot option, that did not work and was forced to switch back to Windows Boot Manager which you were correct about - Windows did boot from Windows Boot Manager and not the SSD, was left to think it had actually used the SSD since I had done a clean install on it and was getting boot times of 10s or so.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
V

Viktor_21

Prominent
May 12, 2017
14
0
510


All done!
I've created a boot partition on the SSD and removed the one on the HDD, screenshot below:

EZuQHnK.png
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
V

Viktor_21

Prominent
May 12, 2017
14
0
510


Yes, it all works well. I've actually left only the boot manager from SSD as boot option and removed any other to see if it works.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom