[SOLVED] Windows and Bios can't read internal/external drives.

cinco312

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Dec 18, 2011
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I recently built a PC and everything went fine. I ordered a secondary SSD, both SanDisk Plus, and ran benchmarks and found out the SSD with windows was performing 50% slower so instead of starting over I tried to clone the disk, it kinda worked but then decided to format and switch drives. Now the problems start. I created the partition and cleaned it through diskpart, then assigned letter C, now windows setup doesn't recognize any drives connected. Before this I was getting mbr and gpt errors so I converted to either of them to see if it would work and then I was getting virtual disk errors.

So now I'm stuck with windows not reading any drives and my bios isn't booting to the USB windows drive. How do I unbleep myself from this situation?
 

cinco312

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Dec 18, 2011
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18,510
Gigabyte B360M DS3H BIOS Date 2020/01/20
Intel i5-9600K Unlocked 3.70GHz Turbo 4.60GHz 95W
HyperX Predator Black 16GB 4000MHz DDR4 CL16 DIMM
SanDisk SSD Plus 1TB SSD SATA III 6 Gb/s x2
GeForce GTX 1070 TI Armor
Evga 650 watt Power Supply

I used the windows creation tool, or whatever the name is. It worked fine on the initial install and then I was able to get into cmd but now, nothing. Is resetting the bios an option? I know I screwed the drive up by creating partitions and whatnot through diskpart. It kept saying to convert to gpt, then mbr, it was so confusing. I'm afraid even another brand new drive won't work.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Multiple wrong steps.

Just start over.
One drive connected, and a clean install on it.
 

Flamebrander

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Aug 1, 2020
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4,940
I recently built a PC and everything went fine. I ordered a secondary SSD, both SanDisk Plus, and ran benchmarks and found out the SSD with windows was performing 50% slower so instead of starting over I tried to clone the disk, it kinda worked but then decided to format and switch drives. Now the problems start. I created the partition and cleaned it through diskpart, then assigned letter C, now windows setup doesn't recognize any drives connected. Before this I was getting mbr and gpt errors so I converted to either of them to see if it would work and then I was getting virtual disk errors.

So now I'm stuck with windows not reading any drives and my bios isn't booting to the USB windows drive. How do I unbleep myself from this situation?
I actually had this problem before, so the first thing you want to do is to go into UEFI and make sure that your Data cables are plugged into SATA ports that are active, you can see this in SATA configuration. If they are and the UEFI shows them, then the next thing to do is to go into the "Boot" section and go to manual boot override. Select your boot device, and it should boot you into Windows. And then you can go into disk management and fix it.

It also could have been an issue with your clone, did you clone all of the partitions? The only one that you don't REALLY need is Recovery, but every thing else is essential if you want to run it. I hope this helps!