Not booting correctly

[Ambulancedin]

So I went out of town for a few days and came back to turn on my PC to a windows installation screen. It was working fine previously.

Windows 10 is installed on a SATA SSD, and i have an HDD for storage.

When I have JUST the SSD plugged in, windows starts fine and all is well. When I have JUST the HDD plugged in, it loads a windows installation screen. When I have both plugged in, it appears to only boot from the HDD and brings up the windows installation screen. (The drive has mostly games from steam, pictures, videos, text files, etc so I"m not sure where the windows installation is even coming from)

The HDD looks fine when I plug it in via a SATA dock I have. All my stuff is there.

The Asus UEFI Bios shows the SSD as the first boot option, but whenever I try to change boot order and save/exit the bios tells me i haven't made any bios changes. There's an option to override boot priority and click a drive to boot from, even when I try that it won't boot properly.

I have tried changing the order of the SATA ports (Don't know why that would make a difference as it was working fine previously)


Pls Help :-(

Specs:
Windows 10
Asus Maximus VIII Hero
i6700K
EVGA Supernova 750w
16GB Gskill ripjaws V series 2400 (2x8gb)
Asus strix OC GTX 1070
seagate barracuda 3TB HDD
Adata 240GB premier SP550

 

[jr9]

Abnormal. If you have a backup drive I would perform a full backup to it and go into disk management and delete the volumes on the HDD to see if it does the same thing when the drive is just a pile of sectors.

CrystalDiskInfo can tell you if there is a physical problem with the HDD itself.

 

[R0GG]

Known issue or bug with Asus Bios it doesn't acknowledge some bios changes but it will save them if you hit apply regardless of the message.
In the Bios : Verify that " Windows UEFI loader + your SSD name" is the 1st boot drive selected ( not the bare " your SSD name" ) in the Boot device priority list if it's buried away look for it and make it the 1 st boot device : where to look: 1. Boot device priority 2.Hard drive priority : at times the windows UEFI SSD won't appear in boot priority options until some change is made to 2. hard drive priority. I have Asus z270e mobo and it took me a little while to get acquainted with it's Bios whims
I would empty all the other extra boot drives list in the boot priority list (list 1) to prevent any possible boot interference from them.

 

[Ambulancedin]

There's only one volume on my HDD that I can see, and its where all the data is saved.

The UEFI SSD was the first boot option when i opened bios the first time, tried changing it to just the name of the SSD, and enabled/disabling fastboot. Current boot option is the uefi ssd.

I am noticing while looking through the files on my HDD, there's a setup.exe and an EFI folder now in the root directory along with my other files and folders, and I don't remember putting them there. The date created/modified is about a year ago, and I didn't even have this storage drive a year ago.

The EFI seems to be bios settings, and the setup is a windows setup file.

?? did windows try to fix itself after a bad shutdown or something and move some files??


My wife also tells me we lost power while i was away. once for about a minute, again for about 30 minutes.
Computer was shut off and its plugged into a surge protector so I'm not sure if that could have affected it at all.

 

[R0GG]

your Storage drive attempt windows install means it is selected in the Bios as first boot device with windows 10 loader, regardless of the reason to why those files are present on your drive, you could silence that install attempt just by making sure windows UEFI SSD is selected as your first boot device.

 

[wpgwpg]

I'd try installing EasyBCD and see if that won't let you set up a good dual boot. I've used it many dozens of times, and it works well.