[SOLVED] Recovery on wrong Drive

[Damonvi]

Not too long ago i built a secondary PC intended to be a slave PC for stream video encoding (Using a Capture Card to take video from my Laptop to stream on twitch via OBS).

In the build, i used 3 old HDDs from laptops i had in storage to stay under budget and still have drives to work with.

Recently i got an SSD to replace the OS drive. the system recognized the SSD as a new drive in disk manager, easy peasy. i used Macrum to do a system clone of the C drive, followed all of the steps to the Tee, and found out 2 things.

First, My bios doesnt recognize the SSD (we'll call this Drive "G"), even when it's the only drive plugged in, only when booting. if i boot windows on the current drive, the SSD is recognized in full. This leads to the second "issue".

Even if i have both the C drive and G drive plugged in, the system doesnt boot, because a THIRD drive has the system recovery installed on it for some reason. We'll refer to this drive as the "D" Drive. Without the D drive plugged in, Windows goes in to a recovery/drive missing loop, and doesnt allow me to proceed in to a "fix" without a Windows USB boot. At the time of writing this, i'm downloading the Windows 10 ISO to a USB since my dedicated one is not with me.

How the recovery partition was installed on a separate drive in the system is a mystery to me, that's never happened in the several years i've been building PCs with multiple drives installed at the initial Windows installation.

However, i now notice that there arent any other partitions on the C Drive other than the Primary Volume (Which has the OS), and an unallocated partition.

So, out of all 4 drives, 1 is empty, the C drive is my OS Drive, the D Drive has the recovery on it, and the G Drive is the SSD "Clone" of the C Drive, but doesnt get recognized in bios for boot purposes. I'll need to use a windows installer ISO to maybe fix this without needing to completely reinstall the OS since i'm not sure where the Key for it is at this moment (Could look back in some Emails).

Regardless of how i carry on with my windows installation (and later installation of my 10 programs), why wont my system recognize the SSD in Bios. makes no sense.

Specs are:

MSI B450I ITX board
AMD Ryzen 5 2400G
8GB of Ram (2x4gb)
G: 180Gb Corsair SSD
C: 600Gb 2.5 HDD (only 33Gb used)
D: 500Gb (Recovery Partition, nothing stored on the primary partition)


Sorry for the god-awful wall of text to whoever chips in to help. it just kept adding whatever seemed relevant as i went along.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Can you show screenshot from Disk Management?

 

[Damonvi]

Can you show screenshot from Disk Management?

https://ibb.co/SQ3xn16

Legend:

Disk 0: empty formatted disk
Disk 1: Current OS Drive
Disk 2: Intended OS Drive SSD
Disk 3: Strange "Recovery" Drive necessary for successful windows bootup

I tried to expand the Space of the F: Drive to include that extra 372 MB because i'm OCD about Unallocated space, but once it changed to the Yellow Volume, i decided to leave it alone until i was finished transferring my OS to the SSD.

Not sure why it's Dynamic and not Basic.

But to reiterate, the only Drive with anything saved/installed is the C: drive with the OS and some programs. all the other drives are empty since i havent needed to save anything to them.

 

[Damonvi]

I didnt want to mess with it any longer, so i unplugged all of my other drives except the SSD, and reinstalled Windows 10 from a USB, after i finally found my key in my emails.

Works 100%.

Not sure what the issue was, not sure why it placed the EFI recovery on a separate drive which required both of the HDDs to be plugged in.

Regardless, i cracked, and just started from scratch. however, i waited to format the OS hdd so that i could take all the download files off of it, and the config files from my documents for those programs. i'll likely be able to just reinstall those programs and get them back to the way i had them before, but manually. very tedious, but i wasnt going to waste more time trying to fix a dumb problem with a simple solution.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Disk 3 is the only one, that contains bootloader in that screenshot.
EFI System partition - this is bootloader partition. It has nothing to do with "Recovery".
Without it system is not bootable.

Why do you have those unallocated 822MB and 322MB spots on your drives?

After you have reinstalled OS with only SSD connected, I'd suggest, you clean Disk 3 and convert it back to basic.
You don't want multiple bootloaders or dynamic disks in your system.