Question Gigabyte Z370XP SLI won't boot when secondary M.2 SSD is removed.

[netizenk]

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370XP SLI
BIOS: F11/F12
Primary M.2 (M2P_32G): Samsung 970 PRO 512
Secondary M.2 (M2Q_32G): ADATA SX8000NP
OS: Windows 10 1809

OS is installed on Samsung 970 PRO.

As stated in the title, when secondary M.2 is removed the system gets into an infinite loop, after booting it opens BIOS, when I select Exit without saving or Save and exit, it just goes back to BIOS. It never shows Windows loading progress wheel, never shows any error messages.
When this happens it also removes all devices from Boot Option Priorities list and when I press F12 to choose the disk to boot from I can see the Samsung but if I select it, it goes back into BIOS and on with the loop. Tried with both F11 and F12b BIOS, exact same results.

Any idea what is happening/how to resolve this?

 

[Barty1884]

Hmm, take a look at the partitions on the drive.
Possible you ended up with the boot manager on a secondary drive.

However, if that were the case, I'd expect the "reboot and select proper boot device" error message.

 

[netizenk]

Hmm, take a look at the partitions on the drive.
Possible you ended up with the boot manager on a secondary drive.

However, if that were the case, I'd expect the "reboot and select proper boot device" error message.

Yes, forgot to mention that the OS was originally on ADATA and I used the Samsung data migration software to clone ADATA to Samsung 970 PRO... Looks like something went south during that process and the machine is still booting from ADATA. What threw me off was the fact that there were no boot error messages when ADATA was removed...

 

[Barty1884]

Did you clone the entire drive? Or just the C partition?

Yeah, the lack of error message(s) is definitely strange. Ensure the drive you want to boot from is priority #1 in the BIOS, might help...

 

[netizenk]

Did you clone the entire drive? Or just the C partition?

Yeah, the lack of error message(s) is definitely strange. Ensure the drive you want to boot from is priority #1 in the BIOS, might help...

Samsung Data Migration just states that it will copy everything, there are no configurable options... I'm trying to clone again, will reply if it works this time or if I'll have to reinstall Windows...

 

[netizenk]

Well, SDM claims it verified the partition and successfully cloned the data to Samsung. I'll shut down now and remove ADATA again to see if it will boot from Samsung now...

 

[netizenk]

This time SDM worked fine and I was able to remove ADATA and the system is now booting from Samsung. Thanks for your help.

 

[Barty1884]

No problem, I didn't do anything 🤣 but I'm glad you're sorted now