Windows Boot Tied to Unused Drive?

[Firion Hope]

Basically I have two drives in my computer that both had windows 10 installed at one point, I removed windows off of one of them and I'd like to remove the drive from my PC entirely, but whenever I take it out windows gives me a message "install valid boot media and restart". What do I need to do so I can remove said drive and keep windows?

(also after that I'm going to install an SSD and copy over windows from the drive I'm not removing if that makes any difference)

 

[Ralston18]

Were you using dual boot? Easy to have things go astray there....

May sure that your current drive connections are all tight. Data and power - both ends.

If okay and still not booting, swap the connections between the two drives. Trusting that the drives have identical connections.

 

[Firion Hope]

Were you using dual boot? Easy to have things go astray there....

May sure that your current drive connections are all tight. Data and power - both ends.

If okay and still not booting, swap the connections between the two drives. Trusting that the drives have identical connections.

Drive connections are fine and swapping connections does nothing, it has to have the unused drive plugged in to work. I did have it dualbooted in the past.

 

[Ralston18]

"Valid boot media".

Windows OS is tied to the computer and you may have confused Windows by switching things around.

You may be able to get things worked out with a boot editor such as EasyBCD or the graphical Visual BCD Editor. Must be careful.

Hard to tell without knowing more about the OS history and the upgrades you have gone through. Windows may now think that you do not have a valid license key.... May need Microsoft intervention if the license is to be transferred and can be transferred.

 

[USAFRet]

When you installed the OS, were both drives connected? Windows has a nasty habit of putting the boot partition on the other drive.
Remove it, and no boot for you.

To fix?
Disconnect that second drive
Boot from your Windows install disk, and go to Repair.
That may fix things.