Computer needs both hard drives to boot

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Darkdarce

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Nov 5, 2014
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I am a bit of a novice when it comes to dealing with computer issues, I can format a system and change hardware and software but after days of searching I can't even find a similar problem to the one I am currently facing. For well over a year I have had two hard drives in my system, one that i use as the primary for the operating system and all of my programs, and a second terabyte hard drive that I use as storage. I must have accidentally had both installed when I did my initial set up, as now I cannot get my computer to run unless both hard drives are plugged in. This was not an issue until yesterday, when I attempted to connect an external hard drive internally, as the case was damaged beyond repair, which I have done before. Here is where my problem comes in. After internally installing the external drive, my computer was no longer able to find my storage drive. After running repairs and trying everything I could think of, I can finally see my storage drive again, but it appears to be completely empty of the terabyte of information I had stored to it. I planned on taking it to a professional in an attempt to retrieve the information, but as previously mentioned, now I cannot even turn my computer on unless both the primary and storage drives are attached. All drives are Western Digital, and I'm not sure if any of this is helpful, but when going into properties this is the information for the primary drive: WDC WD10EADS-00P8B0 ATA Device, and the information for the storage drive: WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 ATA Device. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with a computer I've put together myself. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Did you accidentally set up these two in a RAID 0 format? If this is the case then you cannot run one without the other cause each contains 1/2 of your Operating system and files. If this is the case then you would have to get a third hard drive or flash drive, move all your files over you want to keep, turn off RAiD in BIOS and then reinstall the OS on one drive. Even in RAID you can have multiple partitions.
 
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I don't believe this is the case due to the fact that until I attempted to recover the data from the external hard drive, I have had both internal hard drives working with no problems, and the storage hard drive had been full (931.41gb) with information that for some reason I can no longer access. I have now noticed though that the storage hard drive has a 100mb partition for System Reserved, which I assume must be working due to being able to turn the computer on when both drives are plugged in, although it is for some reason still showing that the rest of the drive (which should be full to capacity) is empty.
 
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Ugh. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Previous versions of Windows would only let you install on the first drive specifically to prevent what's happened to you.

Starting with Windows 7 (or maybe Vista), they let you install the OS onto any drive. The catch was that the computer still had to boot off the first drive. Windows installs a small partition with a boot manager on it on the first drive (this is the 100 MB system reserved partition you found on your storage drive), then puts the OS on the second drive.

Since the boot manager was installed on the storage drive, it was actually the computer's boot drive (first drive in BIOS boot order). When you started the computer, it read the boot manager off the storage drive, the boot manager then told it to start Windows from your OS drive. So both drives had to be present for you to start Windows.

Remove the storage drive. It sounds like it got formatted as part of the repair. Assuming you did a quick format, your data is still there (mostly), but hidden by the new partition table. A professional should be able to recover your data. But stop messing with the drive - anything you do to it could make the data unrecoverable. If you're willing to take a chance with your data and not pay the professional hundreds of dollars, look into an unformat tool after you've got the system running off one drive again.

With only the Windows drive in the computer, boot off the install DVD and attempt a repair. If that works, you should be able to boot off of the Windows drive. For good measure, go into the BIOS and make sure that particular drive is set as the first drive in your boot order (otherwise your computer will become confused when you plug in the storage drive again).
 
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As disheartened as I am to admit it, it seems that everything you said was spot on. It seems I did a poor job of my initial set up. I went into BIOS to set the correct drive as first in the boot order, and unfortunately the install DVD isn't able to fix the problem for me after three attempts. At this point I'm wondering if the only thing I can do (to fix the primary hard drive) is to remove the storage drive, format the primary and go off of a fresh install.
Once I have the primary hard drive fixed I shall look into an unformat tool simply because I don't have the money to seek professional help for two drives and as much as I will be very sad to lose all of that data, it is replaceable (albeit replacing it will be a slow arduous process).
I shall include the error from the repair, in case it might be of help.

Problem Event Name: StartupRepairOffline
Problem Signature 01: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 02: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 03: unknown
Problem Signature 04: -1
Problem Signature 05: ExternalMedia
Problem Signature 06: 1
Problem Signature 07: CorruptBootConfigData
OS Version : 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033

Thank you for helping a novice through a difficult time!
 
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If you have information that you absolutely need, you can remove the hard drives, take them to another computer, install them there and they will show up as just another drive. From there you can save your files on a flash drive or such. After than you can go and reformat them as you wish.
 
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That's not really a surprising result, since the drive probably doesn't even have a MBR (master boot record). I'm kinda surprised that Windows' auto-repair would give up that easily though. It's basically saying "there is no boot information on this disk, I give up" before it even tries to find a Windows installation.

Try the steps on the following site to get your Windows drive bootable (again, make sure it's the only drive in the computer, so you don't accidentally change a different drive). I don't think the 100 MB partition is absolutely necessary if Windows resides on the boot drive. Simply adding a MBR may be enough to get it booting.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/recovering-windows-bootloader
 
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I've been attempting everything you've suggested thus far, and while things look better I am unfortunately still not quite in the clear, my main problem now is it doesn't matter if the storage drive is plugged in or not, I can no longer so much as even get into Windows. I tried every option listed on the link save for purchasing the repair disk download (and believe me at this point I'm ready to even give that a shot) except my only disc burner is on the computer I can no longer access at all. When attempting to log into Windows now I get the following error:

File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.

Upon running the Startup Repair I'm faced with the following code.

Problem Event Name: StartupRepairOffline
Problem Signature 01: 0.0.0.0
Problem Signature 02: 0.0.0.0
Problem Signature 03: unknown
Problem Signature 04: 0
Problem Signature 05: unknown
Problem Signature 06: 1
Problem Signature 07: unknown
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033

I have tried each step of the link three separate times, and unfortunately I keep getting the same error. Any more help would also be greatly appreciated.
 
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Ok, the only possibilities I can think of then are that the Windows partition isn't flagged as active/bootable, and/or it's on an extended partition (assuming it was formatted MBR and not GPT - Windows defaults to MBR on disks 2 TB or smaller).

If the Windows partition is primary, then the problem may just be that it isn't flagged as active/bootable in the partition table (though I would've thought Windows repair would've fixed that). You're going to have to somehow burn and boot off a tool like the Ultimate Boot CD, and use one of the partition management tools to modify the partition flags. It should be set active or bootable, and system.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

If the Windows partition is an extended partition, then you can't boot it. The only solution then is to shrink the Windows partition to leave some space in front, shrink the extended partition, then have Windows repair install that 100 MB boot manager partition in front. I can point you to tools which will let you resize the partitions (MiniTools Partition Wizard), but I'm not sure how to make Windows repair recreate the 100 MB boot manager partition.

You could try installing a third party boot manager like GRUB, but it's not the easiest thing to configure. On the plus side, it's not dependent on partition flags and will happily boot Windows off an extended partition.

Other than that, wipe and reinstall Windows is all I've got. Sorry I can't be of more help.
 
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Thanks for everything, you've been an incredible help! I unfortunately did not get it working but I know from experience how hard it is to attempt to diagnose and fix problems over the internet with limited knowledge of the problem itself as well as what's been tried for fixes. At this point though I think it would be best if I could find a way to restore it to what it was, using the system reserved from the storage drive to boot just so that I can get in and get my files before performing a clean install (keeping only one hard drive installed when I do so to ensure that a similar situation doesn't arise), so my last question would be... any idea how to make it boot how it was earlier this morning? I've plugged the storage drive back in but I'm still just getting the same errors. *Edit* I have finally got back into my computer in the way I was able to earlier, at this point I will just transfer everything off of it and then give it a fresh install. Thanks again for all the help, at the very least most of my questions were answered and although I wasn't able to get the fix I was looking for, I am now at least able to make some informed decisions.
 
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