Windows 10 boot fail - installed new copy of windows on seperate HDD

[ishwoo]

Hi guys,

currently stuck with two installations of windows on two different HDD, ones fresh and ones old (but unusable) and I need to get on the old one.

Recently I fell for the windows 10 upgrade thing. I had HDD A and B all set up nicely in Win7 and when i upgraded only HDD A made it through, HDD B appeared to have been killed off and was no longer usable or recognizable by windows 10. This was fine until i ran out of space and decided to get HDD B working. I did this by downloading a partition program and wiping the entire HDD B (this was my back up drive, 'luckily' i had everything backed up on HDD A...) which made it work until i reset my PC.

Upon restarting my PC it no longer recognized Windows 10 was installed. I presumed HDD A had failed as it was Western Digital and they only seem to last a year so I installed a new copy of windows on HDD B. As it turns out HDD A didn't fail and still carried my old copy of windows and whatever I did with resetting HDD B stopped it from booting properly

The problem is now i'm stuck with a fresh copy of windows on HDD B (which I don't want) and I can still see all my files on HDD A. Is there anyway to get the boot working again on HDD A? HDD A contains all my drivers, passwords saved on chrome etc so I'd like to boot straight into HDD A and keep HDD B as a backup as i originally intented.

I can try booting into HDD A but it automatically loads the new windows installation on HDD B instead.

 

[Colif]

take HDD B out for now, we try to fix A.

On another PC, download the Windows 10 media creation tool and use it to make a win 10 installer on USB - its just a boot disk

change boot order so USB is first, hdd second
boot from installer, on 2nd screen , after languages, choose repair this PC
follow this: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/repair-master-boot-record-mbr-windows until it starts talking about recovery drives. restart PC and see if it boots

I think what happened is cause you had two hdd in PC at same time when you installed, win 10 put the MBR it used to boot drive A on Drive B, and when you deleted the drive it was lost completely, I haven't seen it do that before but anything possible with updgrades that are essentially fresh installs.

If A works, do you want B to be on Win 10 or did you want it as 7?? Were they using two different licences or the same one?

 

[ishwoo]

take HDD B out for now, we try to fix A.

On another PC, download the Windows 10 media creation tool and use it to make a win 10 installer on USB - its just a boot disk

change boot order so USB is first, hdd second
boot from installer, on 2nd screen , after languages, choose repair this PC
follow this: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/repair-master-boot-record-mbr-windows until it starts talking about recovery drives. restart PC and see if it boots

I think what happened is cause you had two hdd in PC at same time when you installed, win 10 put the MBR it used to boot drive A on Drive B, and when you deleted the drive it was lost completely, I haven't seen it do that before but anything possible with updgrades that are essentially fresh installs.

If A works, do you want B to be on Win 10 or did you want it as 7?? Were they using two different licences or the same one?

Thanks for the reply, I actually fixed it. It turns out WIN10 decided it needed to use an entire 1TB HDD as the boot partition, while i wiped the boot partition it also unmounted/activated HDD A. I fixed it by unplugging HDD B, setting HDD A as the active one then doing as you suggested followed by running start-up repair. I've now reformatted HDD B and the computer works as intended.

 

[Colif]

wow, a 1tb partition for 1 file, talk about greedy. Glad you fixed it