Question M.2 SATA SSD nowhere to be seen

[Anarche]

Some of this story may not be relevant to my current issue but I am just laying out the journey I went on today. I just got a Samsung 980 PRO which is an NVMe M.2 SSD. for Christmas. Before that I had a 1TB Crucial SATA M.2 SSD, a 250GB SATA Kingston 2.5in SSD, and an HDD. Windows 10 was installed on the Kingston, all my games and some programs were on the Crucial. I installed the NVMe SSD today and installed Windows 11 on it no problem. When I would reboot I would get the option to boot Windows 10 or 11 as I didn't do anything to my other drives. I could see all my other drives in file explorer and elsewhere. I could view the contents of every drive except for the Crucial, error message said it needed to be formatted which I didn't do. Next thing I did was use MSI BIOS to secure erase the Kingston with Windows 10 on it. Then when I booted up it would go straight to BIOS. The new drive did not and still does not show up as a bootable drive anywhere so I couldn't adjust the boot order to fix the issue. To solve the issue after a lot of troubleshooting why the NVMe SSD wasn't showing up in BIOS, I simply reinstalled Windows 11 on it. Now it boots into Windows no problem.

However, the only drives I could see in file explorer were the HDD and the Samsung. My other 2 SSDs weren't there. They also weren't in Disk Management, disk part, or disks & volumes. Everything I read online was to try initializing the volume, using disk part, etc. But none of that would work because they aren't listed in any form. Finally I used a 3rd party recovery software which was able to find the Kingston SSD as a lost partition and recovered it. No Crucial found. Since then I've tried changing my BIOS PCIe settings between ACHI and whatever the RAID option was. Secure boot is off, fast boot is off, CMS is off. I've also tried reseating the drive on the motherboard. Just for reference I had it and still have it installed in the motherboards 2nd M.2 slot where it worked previously, with the new drive being in slot 1. BIOS shows nothing in the 2nd slot.

Let me know if there is any further information I can provide to help.

I appreciate any insight here, thank you!

 

[USAFRet]

What motherboard?

When you installed the new 980 Pro and installed Win 11, you still had the other drives connected?
That is why you got the menu screen to choose between 10 and 11.

Secure Erase of the Kingston, which held the boot partition for both OSs, resulted in not being able to boot from your new 90 Pro and Win 11.

Your brand new install of Win 11 should have been done with ONLY the 980 Pro connected.

 

[Anarche]

My motherboard is an MSI Z370 KRAIT GAMING. Yes the other drives were still connected, and yes I know that is why I got the menu to choose my OS. Thank you for explaining the boot partition. I figured that when I installed Windows 11 from a bootable USB drive as an ISO that it would have everything it needed as standalone on the new SSD. It is odd to me that just because I also had the previous boot drive connected it knew not to make a separate boot partition. I will try to remember that going forward!

Do you have any thoughts on why the Crucial isn't seen by anything?

 

[USAFRet]

Do you have any thoughts on why the Crucial isn't seen by anything?

You'll need to look in the user manual. It will list specific drive combinations and conflicts.

 

[Anarche]

Something I just remembered which may be relevant. I had encrypted the drive(s) with VeraCrypt. When I would boot my PC I would have to enter my password for it to boot and decrypt. I don't remember which drives I encrypted though. It may have been the drive in question. Or it could have been the Kingston with Windows 10 on it, or both.

 

[Anarche]

Well I can't believe it, but all of a sudden the missing SSD has appeared for seemingly no reason at all. I won't complain.

 

[Anarche]

And now it is gone again...