second hard drive with boot files no longer showing up?

[Artemissz]

A few weeks ago my second hard drive stopped showing up in "my computer". My motherboard only supports 2 at any given time and I usually will open up the case and plug in my 3ed one since it has movies on it. But one day when I went to plug in the 3ed drive it wouldn't show up.

The second drive used to be my main hard drive, but I've deleted everything on it and now it just has my main drive's boot files on it, so i don't want to restart my computer in case it isn't able to boot. (I deleted everything on the drive manually without formatting, including windows files. But it was still able to boot my main drive and I wasn't able to format it.)

It's not just my second hard drive though, it's my 3ed one as well, none of them show up in my "this PC" folder

When I open up disk management, the disk shows up, but I'm not sure what to do to make it accessible without corrupting the boot files.

Here's a screenshot of my drives in Disk Management:

Disk 0 is the one with my boot files and disk 1 has my operating system on it.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

 

[Colif]

PC should boot as it seems your entire 1tb drive is now your boot partition, its normal for them not to have a drive letter as you don't want to accidentally delete those files. 1tb is an awful lot for a boot partition

Since its marked active and system, it means it is still seen as the boot partition

3rd drive not showing at all in disk management? is screen shot of only 2 of them?

which version of windows is this? You should be able to relocate the boot sector onto C drive unless you want it where it is?

 

[Artemissz]

PC should boot as it seems your entire 1tb drive is now your boot partition, its normal for them not to have a drive letter as you don't want to accidentally delete those files. 1tb is an awful lot for a boot partition

Since its marked active and system, it means it is still seen as the boot partition

3rd drive not showing at all in disk management? is screen shot of only 2 of them?

Also i'm using windows 10. My main drive is a 1TB SSD, my second drive is a 1TB HDD, and the 3ed one is a 3TB HDD

which version of windows is this? You should be able to relocate the boot sector onto C drive unless you want it where it is?

my motherboard only has 2 Sata cable slots, so if i want to use the 3ed drive i have to open my case and swap drives.

At first i thought the sata cable might have broken somehow, so i got a new one and now the 3ed drive shows up again, however it's now using my second hard drive's name? (it renamed itself) and suddenly half the files don't work anymore. I just get an error message saying that it can't find the file i've clicked on

I'm scared to restart my computer though because this issue with my second drive not showing up seems to have come out of nowhere. I had no problems before and I'm not sure what caused it.

Is there a way to get it to boot just in case I restart it and it isnt able to boot like before? possibly with a usb or something?

 

[Colif]

which drive do you unplug to run the 3rd drive? how does that even work? If you unplug boot drive, PC shouldn't boot, and if you unplug windows, PC shouldn't boot... is windows on 3rd drive at all?

I assume you unplug PC when you do the swap

ideal solution would be to create the boot files on hdd2 and then you wouldn't need the 1st drive in at all and could use 3rd all the time, without swapping them... see here for creating an efi partition on the windows hdd - https://www.tenforums.com/installation-upgrade/52837-moving-recreating-efi-partition.html