Changing boot priority in BIOS causes Win10 not to boot

[Neutronium101]

Hi everyone,

Ok so here is the full story...

USB drive isn't detecting, suspecting a fault in the external enclosure I pulled it apart and installed the HDD (direct via SATA, of course) to recover the data. Installing the drive caused Win10 to just hang, infinately load (the dots be spinning all day). Now this is how I've got things setup, old win7 HDD is still there (rather than upgrading or installing over the old HDD I prefer to install new OS's on new HDDs, no chance of lossing data because you forgot to back it up) so we have a dual boot situation. Win10 hangs before we get to the boot options, it's almost like it's not finding the MBR, maybe?

Well it's odd, so I look into BIOS thinking that there may be an issue with boot order. It should be like this.

SSD - win10

HDD1 - old win7

HDD0 - data storage

HDD2 - attempt at data recovery

However it looked liked like this.

HDD0 - data storage

SSD - win10

HDD1 - old win7

HDD2 - attempt at data recovery

Well that's not right, why on earth would the data drive be the first to boot? That's not what I was expecting. Changing the boot order to SSD > HDD1 > HDD0 (I removed HDD2 to focus on this issue) caused a 0x000000f \boot\bcd error. Wait, what? That was a common error in win7 if you had bad sectors!

Changing the boot priority back to HDD0 > SSD > HDD1 causes win10 (and win7 if the option is choosen in the boot menu) to boot as per usual.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? I surely haven't and I'm not sure where to go from here in Tshooting. The drives seem healthy (with the exception of HDD2 of course which I will get around to resolving) so I'm at a lose as to what's happening here.

 

[Colif]

can you show me a screen shot of disk management?

bcd = boot config data. that was exactly what you thought, the PC cannot find the mbr.

I suspect what has happened is when you installed win 10 on the ssd, you had all the other drives in PC at same time and the boot sector for the ssd is actually on the hdd. windows will do that if there is another drive in PC with enough free space when you install it. It also replaces the win 7 version so that helps to explain why win 7 also boots in that order.

I expect to find a MBR partition on HDD0

 

[Neutronium101]

can you show me a screen shot of disk management?

bcd = boot config data. that was exactly what you thought, the PC cannot find the mbr.

I suspect what has happened is when you installed win 10 on the ssd, you had all the other drives in PC at same time and the boot sector for the ssd is actually on the hdd. windows will do that if there is another drive in PC with enough free space when you install it. It also replaces the win 7 version so that helps to explain why win 7 also boots in that order.

I expect to find a MBR partition on HDD0

Well that was a piece of information that I wasn't aware of, win10 loading the mbr to another drive other than the primary. What would be the practical application of this? It can't be like load balancing fsmo roles. I wonder if I can just shrink the primany and move the mbr to the ssd? Interesting, I'll research that in the morning.

As for disk management, yeah I looked into that after posting, the boot partition is the ssd.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xdavypyeejp18fa/Capture0.PNG?dl=0 <-- that would be the screenshot for disk management.

Thanks for the input Colif.

 

[Colif]

can i get the bottom part of the disk management screen that shows the partitions?

what drive is the system reserved partition on? that is the boot partition

The 450 MB (UEFI-GPT) or 500 MB (Legacy BIOS-MBR) System Reserved partition is used for the Boot Manager code, BCD (Boot Configuration Database), System Recovery Options (Windows RE), and start up files for BitLocker (if turned on).

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1950-windows-10-clean-install.html

not sure why yours only 100mb but I think I have seen them that size before. I don't have a system reserved partition so I cannot tell default size. My partitions are the result of not knowing what i was doing when i installed win 10