Issues with boot - two HDDs

[Tatazildo]

Hello! This is a long post with a problem I've never encountered before.

I've been having a lot of problems booting my computer for the past week or so. I use two HDDs and never had any problems before. My main HDD is a 2 TB SATA 6 GB/s, where the OS and its files are stored. I'll call this one OS HDD. My secondary HDD is a 500 GB SATA 3GB/s, where I store backups, rare music bootlegs, FLACs, sheet music and things like that. I'll call this one Music HDD.

One week ago I was using it to study music and when I tried to access a folder in the Music HDD Windows told me the folder was corrupt and unreadable. I couldn't move, rename or delete the folder, so I gave up and went back to playing GTA V.

When I quit the game later Action Center was telling me a hard disk was corrupted and it needed to solve some erros. I agreed to reboot and do the procedure. The computer rebooted, checked the HDD before boot (I know it checked the correct HDD because of the drive letter assigned to it) and continued normally.

After using the computer I shut it down normally. The following day I tried to turn my computer on and it wouldn't pass the Windows logo boot screen. I tried again and again and decided to download a Windows recovery tool from Microsoft on a USB stick if I had bigger problems. I figured it had something to do with the Music HDD because of the checking it did the other day, not the OS HDD. So I unplugged the Music HDD before boot and Windows gave me a blue screen with error 0x000000e saying it couldn't find winload.exe or something. I found it really weird as all of the system files are saved on the OS HDD.

After searching online and talking to my IT friends a bit I discovered it could be something related to the MBR, in which Windows was sure its files were somewhere else when actually they were in the same HDD all along. So I followed the procedure of fixing the MBR on the OS HDD. Using the command prompt on USB Windows Recovery Tool I ran:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd

Later I used:

chkdsk /f /x
sfc

And the OS HDD began to work again, voila! But the problem here is if I reconnect the Music HDD to the motherboard I can't pass the boot screen. I tried fixing the MBR on the Music HDD with the USB and disconnecting the OS HDD. It took a while longer but nothing really happened, the problem was still there.

I would like to know more about this issue, about MBR and hopefully solve this problem, please.

Can you help?

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, Tatazildo!

This seems unfortunate, indeed! I'd suggest you to back up your data somewhere else before proceeding with the troubleshooting. Then I think it's best to test both HDDs using the manufacturer's diagnostic tool in order to determine the heath and SMART status of the drives.
When you were installing Windows on your primary drive, did you unplug the secondary HDD? It's possible if you had both drives in your system to encounter an OS confusion, which would result in such annoying boot and partition table issues.
Either way, since your system is running just fine without the secondary drive plugged, I believe that is not the case but it might mean that the HDD is failing and causing your system to lag. I'd recommend you to connect the drive externally using a SATA-to-USB cable or a docking station to see if you'd be able to access it. Another thing you could try is testing the drive on another computer and see how the other system will react to it.

Keep me posted. Hope this helps you!
SuperSoph_WD