Question NVME drive randomly stopped booting after 2 years despite still being detected by BIOS and Windows

Aug 4, 2024
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Hey y'all,

My PC has a multiple-disc layout with a Seagate Barracuda 2TB hard drive, Crucial MX500GB SSD, and a 1TB 970EVO Samsung EVO NVME SSD. Due to the order in which I got these drives (HDD -> SSD -> NVME), all three drives boot Windows; however, the NVME has been my primary use drive.

I was very recently turning on my PC when I got a Blue Screen with an error message: page fault in non-paged area. After multiple restarts and standard troubleshooting (Disk Cleanups, Windows RE, and Disk Diagnosis) I still am unable to boot into this drive and instead am forced to boot into my older HDD. After opening Disk Management to check the afflicted disk (Disk 2), I noticed that there was no System Reserved partition for the NVME drive and three different-sized recovery partitions aside from the primary partition.

From what I've come to understand, the disk layout method my computer uses, MBR, is quite outdated and can only have 4 partitions, so could the excessive number of recovery partitions be the reason my Windows for that drive is unable to boot? Otherwise would anyone know what is the issue with this drive? I'd strongly prefer not to have to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows. I'm happy to provide more info if needed.
 

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

You can have multiple partitions on your drives, that can't necessarily be the reason for a drive to stop booting from though you mentioned having a BSoD, perhaps you can pass on a .dmp file for us to look into? If the BSoD only happens when one of your drives is being accessed, then you might want to pay attention to which drive it triggers the BSoD.

As for your platform, can you please pass on the make and model of your motherboard and it's BIOS version? Out of curiosity, do you have multiple OSes on your drives(a dual-boot)?
 
As your image shows your drive setup is a mess. You may have to reinstall windows so you should prepare for that. Be prepared to convert at least one drive, the nvme, to GPT and then reinstall windows. Note that only 1 drive must be connected at the time you reinstall windows; the others can be connected after installation is complete. Once you get windows working again you can use your older drives to store backup images from a program like Macrium.