[SOLVED] Drives showing and not showing depending on where you look

[Marlous]

Short story: I bought an SSD drive that I just installed a few days ago. Down below I'll list evertyhing I've done leading up to this conundrum, but basically I've got drives not showing that do exist and drives showing that don't exist. See screenshot below.

My pc physically contains an SSD (500Gb) with a clean Win10 installed (only other programs are MS Office 2013, FF, Chrome) and an older HDD (500Gb) that's been formatted. There's no floppy drive present, hasn't been for years, but it keeps showing even after this clean install.

Explorer: shows a floppy drive that doesn't exist and a drive D: containing a folder named 'boot' that also doesn't exist.
Disk Management: shows some weird partitions I never created, does not show HDD (E: ).
BIOS: shows HDD and SSD, floppy set to 'disabled' by me (during step 11 below). Also mentions CD-rom as boot option, which doesn't exist either (but not so relevant since it isn't bothering me in Win10).

My goal is to have the SSD as drive C: and the HDD as drive D:, and not have any weird ghost drives show up anywhere. I'd love to get some help with this, since what I found on (parts of) the subject yields advice that people are both defending and rejecting - so I've no idea who to believe.

Okay, so for the steps I've taken.

1. build in SSD and format/initialise drive to make it ready for use
2. attempt to clone HDD to SSD using Samsung's Data Migration tool, failed
3. strip unnecessary programs to make sure data on HDD is less than the available space on SSD
4. attempt cloning a 2nd time, failed
5. create Win10 install media on newly bought USB
6. remove HDD from pc
7. use USB to install Win10 on SSD (and use same tool to format SSD immediately prior to install process)
8. reboot, change boot order in BIOS so that SSD comes first and not USB
9. update Win10 on SSD, make sure everything seems in order
10. put the old HDD back in
11. check BIOS before launching to make sure the SSD is top of the list
12. boot clean Win10 from SSD
13. wipe and format HDD in Explorer

I'm not sure when exactly the drive currently marked D: showed up, but I suspect it was created during the cloning attempt(s). Could be wrong ofc. The floppy drive has always been there, ever since I got the pc from a friend - he said there used to be a floppy drive in it years ago, but had long since been removed.

 

[Lutfij]

Why are you cloning your drive? You're supposed to backup all critical data(like documents, pictures and videos) over to the drive that wont be formatted or tampered with. Following that, using Windows Media Creation Tools create a bootable installer for Windows 10 and then use that to wipe the HDD's(initial OS) installation. Power down system then have only SSD connected to system, power up and proceed to install the OS from scratch.

Reconnect HDD after you've finished installing all necessary drivers.

What are the specs to your build? List them like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:

 

[Marlous]

Why are you cloning your drive?

Since the guy at the shop told me I could do so - and save myself the hassle of having to backup and clean install. He said Samsung had this great tool for it, which I tried. I had no reason to doubt him.

You're supposed to backup all critical data(like documents, pictures and videos) over to the drive that wont be formatted or tampered with.

I did. I have an external HDD that holds all important documents and files. This drive wasn't connected throughout the entire process. This isn't relevant.

Following that, using Windows Media Creation Tools create a bootable installer for Windows 10 and then use that to wipe the HDD's(initial OS) installation. Power down system then have only SSD connected to system, power up and proceed to install the OS from scratch.

Reconnect HDD after you've finished installing all necessary drivers.

If you read all of my post, you could see that I've done all of this...

What are the specs to your build? List them like so:

CPU: Intel (R) Core (TM) i7 CPU, 920 @ 2.67 gHz
Motherboard: ACPI x64-based PC
Ram: 14 Gb
SSD/HDD: Samsung 860 EVO (500Gb) / WDC_WD5000AAKS-00V1A0 ATA (500Gb)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
PSU: never heard of it and device manager doesn't list it
Chassis: no idea, it doesn't have a brand name
OS: Win10

 

[popatim]

Your motherboard has a Floppy Controller I assume and you haven't disabled it in the bios or device manager.

Your D: drive is there because you cloned and Windows assigned it a Drive letter. In Disk management, rt click the D: and select "Change Drive Letters..." then click "remove". You don't want any drive letters assigned to the HDD's partitions since you want it as your emergency boot/recovery disk.

 

[Marlous]

Your motherboard has a Floppy Controller I assume and you haven't disabled it in the bios or device manager.

I went to device manager and disabled, then uninstalled the floppy controllers. It's finally gone now. Thanks!

Your D: drive is there because you cloned and Windows assigned it a Drive letter. In Disk management, rt click the D: and select "Change Drive Letters..." then click "remove". You don't want any drive letters assigned to the HDD's partitions since you want it as your emergency boot/recovery disk.

I went into Disk Management to have a look, and I noticed that suddenly E: has reared its head. It turns out it's the large partition of disk 1. Which means that D: is a partition of E: ... my old HDD that's supposed to be wiped. So the boot folder, that according to some websites is vital for Windows to boot properly, is... on another drive entirely. This is strange, because I've booted from the SSD successfully when the HDD wasn't even connected. This suggests that the folder isn't as vital as I thought. Very well, off with its head.

Fast forward a few minutes, I've decided to mess around in Disk Management. I puzzled a bit and have now successfully deleted the partition containing the boot folder, used Diskpart to merge all partitions into 1, and renamed my old HDD to D: as it should be. I also deleted its recovery partition, since I prefer to do a clean install if I ever reach the point where I need a recover.

All that's left is the odd 500 Mb partition on the SSD, which might be a remnant of the cloning attempt. However, I can't determine if this is the case. I searched a bit to figure out what to do with it, and found that my best bet is to do another clean install on the SSD - and delete all partitions in the process, so that the new install can go create its own. At least this way I can be sure that all partitions created are necessary for Win10 and aren't still there from earlier efforts.

Thanks for the help.

 

[popatim]

Anytime.
A clean install never hurts and can even fix some issue; it's just time consuming installing everything else you want afterwards.