[SOLVED] I've slowly added a total of 6 Hard drives to my system. And the method i used has created a complete mess... I think

[Ttechnologick]

I have 6 Hard drives installed.

And yeah, i thought i was clever and just stuffed them in all willynilly.

I have programs installed on each one. Windows will show some of the programs in start some in add/remove and some i just randomly find when im going through folders (I just found a separate installation of iCue from october of 2020 and I think i'm going to have to use cmd to uninstall it- because there's no uninstaller and the updated, useful, used, and wanted version is showing up in the add/remove program/app control panel windows 10 settings.. spot. anyway that's not really the question.

the question is... does (screenshot) this look as jacked up as I think it is? and with like 2 ish terabytes of stuff installed is there any way to get windows to organize these drives while maintaining my sanity (i.e. not reinstalling everything)?

Feel free to point and laugh at me for being too lazy to understand how RAID works and why it may be useful.
Also, please help me. This mess has ended up taking a significant portion of my life away because of its sheer... mess. oh, and i've disabled indexing to make it extra obnoxious for myself.

if it matters: bootdirive is C: & the only m.2nvme
D: G: & H: are all SATA SSD ranging from 80-256Gb
E: & F: are both 1 TB HDD
E:, however, has decided to to play make-believe with me and pretends that half of it's capacity never existed.
I have no idea what happened to it but... I do know it also makes userbenchmark spaz out whevenever it does any tests on it. so.


I have no idea how or why they all have recovery and EFI partitions.

Thank you. 🙏

 

[USAFRet]

Yeah, that is pretty bad.

I have 7x physical drives. The 500GB C drive has the usual Windows partitions.
All the others have a single partition.

Each physical drive has its own purpose.
1 for the OS and ALL applications (except games), 1 for photo work, 1 for CAD/video, etc, etc.

Yours having actual applications installed on the other drives makes this MUCH harder to 'fix'.

Feel free to point and laugh at me for being too lazy to understand how RAID works and why it may be useful.

RAID? Not even a little bit.

 

[Colif]

I wonder why (almost) every drive has its own efi. that just seems wrong... I mean, its obviously wrong but it shouldn't have made a new one every time except D which I am guessing was in PC from the start.

it doesn't appear like you cloned C to create the partition order as its different, C has recovery partition after C which is the new way, the older drives have it before the EFI, which is where it used to be

Did you format drives before adding them? Did they have windows on them before?

Are you sure it actually boots off C, you have 5 EFI partitions and any of them could be the boot partition for windows. Having 2 is dangerous but 5? Its only dangerous in that if for some reason the boot drive doesn't react, BIOS could find one of the other EFI and who knows what it will try to boot

here are some ways to discover which one is needed - https://superuser.com/questions/139...-efi-system-partition-is-in-use-by-windows-10

 

[Ttechnologick]

so, not to bring up an old thread... but could it be each drive is given it's own efi due to me subscribing to gamepass? They do some weird ish to drives once windows installs a game on a drive. I suppose to make sure it's not copied, or shared, or whatever.

Still haven't really discovered a way to improve this without formatting everything. which, really isn't much of an option.

 

[USAFRet]

but could it be each drive is given it's own efi due to me subscribing to gamepass?

No.
Or at least I've never heard of that happening.

 

[punkncat]

My questions about this would lie more in the area of, where did you source these drives? In a did they ever serve as the "C" drive on another systems Windows install?
If they did, what method did you utilize to format and make them ready for the current system?

 

[DSzymborski]

so, not to bring up an old thread... but could it be each drive is given it's own efi due to me subscribing to gamepass? They do some weird ish to drives once windows installs a game on a drive. I suppose to make sure it's not copied, or shared, or whatever.

Still haven't really discovered a way to improve this without formatting everything. which, really isn't much of an option.

If formatting everything isn't an option, then you have deeper problems with how you're managing your Windows install. Formatting everything should always be an option. Especially so in godawful messes like this one.

Since this is what you need to do, then let's get there. Why is the proper option somehow unavailable to you?