New Secondary Drive Causes Boot Failure Windows 10

[Hood]

For the second time now, Windows 10 failed to boot after initializing and formatting a spare drive (using Windows Disk Management). After the boot fail, UEFI boot settings were still set to boot from Windows Boot Manager, but it still wouldn't boot, just goes into diagnostic mode, fails to repair boot problem, and goes to the repair menu. In advanced options I can then load a recent image (made with Windows 7 Backup and Recovery in control panel), and everything goes back to normal. My question is what causes this problem, and how do I repair it without re-imaging Windows? I don't recall ever having this problem in other Windows versions, only in Windows 10. Anyone else notice this problem?

 

[Solaris17]

Sounds to me like there are service partitions on the second drive that contains your boot loader. That would explain why it works when you revert back to 7 (which restores the scheme, not to mention I have personally had windows 7 put the boot-loader on a separate HDD) it works and when you upgrade to 10 it still works until you wipe the second drive.

 

[OneMoar]

if its defaulting to diagnostic you have anouther issue
no bootloader no diagnostics
bootloader is likely not the issue you have something else going on
are you sure you formatted the correct partitions
give us screenshots of disk-management

 

[Mussels]

sounds like you made a common mistake when installing windows, and left the other drives connected. OS drive must be on sata 0, preferably with no others connected - or the drive the BIOS sees as the 'first' one will get the important partitions.

 

[OneMoar]

sounds like you made a common mistake when installing windows, and left the other drives connected. OS drive must be on sata 0, preferably with no others connected - or the drive the BIOS sees as the 'first' one will get the important partitions.

lolno
that hasn't been the case since windows xp target drive is always the drive partitioned nothing else is touched ever (windows may mistake what drive is drive0 depending on the bios and controler but that has no bearing on what partitions are made or where) bcd is always installed to partition0 of the drive
what it does sound like is that he had a os on the other drive at one point,and didn't delete all the partitions and the bios picked the first one that had the efi loader after he formatted the wrong drive for the second time in a row

 

[Mussels]

lolno
that hasn't been the case since windows xp target drive is always the drive partitioned nothing else is touched ever (windows may mistake what drive is drive0 depending on the bios and controler but that has no bearing on what partitions are made or where) bcd is always installed to partition0 of the drive
what it does sound like is that he had a os on the other drive at one point,and didn't delete all the partitions and the bios picked the first one that had the efi loader after he formatted the wrong drive for the second time in a row

i run into this constantly, it definitely happens. i've seen it in XP, 7 and 8 in recent months. the bootloader gets thrown onto whatever drive the BIOS thinks is the first one.

 

[OneMoar]

when you use the windows image tool did you select image the entire drive
by default it only images the system partition not the entire drive
which would explain the hinkyness as starting with 8.1 windows actually copies the recovery environment to system reserved
so whats happened here is you have managed to wipe your /system partition out leaving only the recovery partition on one of the drives bios defaulted to whatever was bootable

 

[OneMoar]

i run into this constantly, it definitely happens. i've seen it in XP, 7 and 8 in recent months. the bootloader gets thrown onto whatever drive the BIOS thinks is the first one.

yea if you leave it on auto partition and just blindly click install
nobody with any sense does that
ALWAYS MANUAL
the only other way it can happen is that if you have a two drives in the system and they are both flagged as boot AND you aren't using EFI,in which case you need to scrub the partitions/flags off the drive and fix it right

 

[Hood]

No, I didn't install Windows on anything - I'm saying that on my high-end Windows 10 Pro x64 PC, which by the way has Windows installed on a 400GB Intel 750 Series AIC, when I simply initialize and partition a new storage drive (HDD or SSD), just that, not put anything at all on the drive, just a new, empty, bare drive. When you first plug it in, a Windows dialog pops up, saying that the new disc needs to be initialized, so it can be seen by Windows Disk Management, asking if you want it use MBR or GPT partition table. Then I used Windows Disk Management to format the drive as NTFS in the full available size and assign it a drive letter (or leave it unassigned - doesn't matter). Everything normal, except the new drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer (My computer). So I reboot, and the aforementioned failure to boot occurs. After I get back into Windows, by loading a recent system image onto my Intel 750 Series AIC boot drive, everything is working fine, and the new drive shows up in Windows Explorer as an empty but fully functional drive, with just the one partition, as normal (and I checked it with MiniTool Partition Wizard, no extra system or hidden partitions). This happened the first time with a 1 TB HDD installed to a SATA port on my motherboard. This latest time it was an SSD connected to my PC through an external USB 3 drive dock - with the same result and fix. Maybe I shouldn't use the built in Windows utilities, I should just use MiniTool to initialize and partition the drive, but I still want to know why Windows behaves this way.

 

[rtwjunkie]

sounds like you made a common mistake when installing windows, and left the other drives connected. OS drive must be on sata 0, preferably with no others connected - or the drive the BIOS sees as the 'first' one will get the important partitions.

I second this. This frequently still happens, long past the XP days.

As to Hood, if your prior image is working with the added drive, then it sounds like between that image and now, something got corrupted in the OS.

There's no reason to stop using disk management. I find it to be a very good tool for the basic things it does.

 

[Hood]

I second this. This frequently still happens, long past the XP days.

As to Hood, if your prior image is working with the added drive, then it sounds like between that image and now, something got corrupted in the OS.

There's no reason to stop using disk management. I find it to be a very good tool for the basic things it does.

Thank you, for stating the obvious, but did anyone actually READ my post? Yes "something got corrupted" - not "between that image and now" - but exactly when was, obviously, when I used my perfectly running PC to initialize a new SSD, 30 seconds before the boot failure occurred. Of course all 7 of my existing drives were connected at the time, as why wouldn't they be? I'm only adding a new storage drive, NOT installing Windows! So Windows must be pointing it's boot loader towards the wrong drive - but NOT because of a partition being installed on it - it only contains the partition that I made, and all 4 of the UEFI Windows partitions are still in place on my Intel 750 AIC. other drives look normal - the MBR drives have a single partition, the GPT drives all have the usual 128MB partition as well as the main partition (normal behavior in a UEFI Windows system). I just want to know why Windows behaves this way, and how to prevent it.

 

[OneMoar]

looks like that tool you used messed with the bcd store
run bcdedit /enum all /v
from cmd line and give me the output
I don't know what you mean by 'initialize" but sounds suspiciously like changing partition flags such as setting the drive to 'active'/boot Which will break the BCD store

plug drive in, format drive, set drive letter,then worrie about resizing the partitions
done