[SOLVED] May 2020 Windows 10 update messed up my PC's bootup process

[ekreger]

Hello.

Supposedly my computer was not able to update windows by itself since September. So today I manually updated it through the Microsoft Windows website. After running the updater, to make a long story short, upon startup I am hit with the "Reboot and Select proper boot device" message as if I had not installed Windows entirely. Here's what I have figured out so far:

-I booted from both my SSD and HDD and both had the same message.

-I used my boot USB (from when I first built the PC) to see if it was needed for update but it only prompted a clean installation of windows

-At one point throughout all of my restarting PC/shutting off pc etcetc, the normal blue boot screen showed up for windows update saying "this may take a while, your computer may restart a few times" as if everything was working normally. But as soon as it restarted once, it went back to the same error message.


Will I end up having to completely reinstall windows again? And will it be up to date this time or am I missing something obvious?

Many thanks.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Your problem is likely the fact that you have two drives that both have bootable versions of windows on them and the BIOS has no idea which boot manager to use, or there is just one boot manager for both drives, which happens often when there are multiple instances of Windows but one drive wasn't disconnected when Windows was installed to the other drive.

My recommendation would be to ONLY have Windows installed on ONE drive. Since things are already borked up, and assuming you DO have everything important backed up to another location, I'd disconnect the hard drive entirely, and then, using another machine, download the latest version of the Windows media creation tool and run it. Then do a clean install of Windows, EXACTLY as outlined in my guide. If you do so, then it WILL be completely up to date as much as possible although there will likely be at least a couple of Windows updates that are not incorporated into the latest build version. Not a big deal though. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes after the install is complete to run those updates and be fully up to date.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[ekreger]

Ok, I will try that when I get home. You said I could have possibly installed Windows on both my SSD and HDD, if I were to do a clean install on my SSD like you said, would I have to manually remove windows from my HDD too or will I need to completely clean that HDD too?

 

[Darkbreeze]

AFTER you successfully have Windows running on the SSD, then you will want to probably get rid of all the existing partitions on it and the EASIEST way to do that is to then disconnect the SSD, connect the HDD, run the Windows installer as if you WERE going to install Windows on it but when you get to the point in the installation where you remove all the existing partitions on the drive, as you MUST do as part of the process normally anyway, then you stop and do not go any further. Just remove all the existing partitions but selecting each one and deleting it, and then shut it down.

Then you can reconnect the SSD and HDD, and once in Windows you can use disk management (Or a third party partition utility) to create a partition on the drive, assign it a drive letter and format it so that it can be used for storage of whatever you wish or for backup images.

Alternatively, you can simply use a third party partition tool to remove ALL the existing partitions on the drive, and then create a new partition, drive letter and format, but you can't use disk management to do it until you've removed the existing partitions because it will not allow you to REMOVE Windows system partitions, therefore you have to do it using the installer or a third party tool.