Windows Booting From Wrong Drive

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Mikirae

Commendable
Apr 12, 2017
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I have an NvMe drive that has Windows on it and I was using that as the boot drive before, but I recently put in another drive with Windows on it, and now Windows is booting from that drive. Is there any easy way to change the Windows Boot Manager to my old SSD? Thank you for any help!
 
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When you get into Windows and go to the Disk Manager what shows on the new drive? What shows on the old drive?

With Windows during an install if there are multiple drives it tends to put the boot manager on the second drive with the OS on the first drive. However this should not be the case since you didn't state you did a reinstall.
 
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It shows
Windows Boot Manager (New Hard Drive)
Old Hard Drive
 
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Since Windows isn't loading properly on my SSD, but it's working fine on my other SSD (the one that I don't want it to load on). If I create a system restore point for my drive where Windows isn't working, do a fresh install of Windows, and then restore that point, will it work again?
 
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Thats a good question. I don't know if it will be able to restore. If you do a clean install though make sure only one drive is plugged in as I said 10 will put the boot manager on the second drive.

That said I still wonder if the old drive has the OS partition though.
 
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I went into the partitions from the Windows Installation Media thing from my USB, and it only showed one partition labeled Partition 1.
 
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On the old drive? Then odds are the boot manager is on the second drive. Did you happen to run one of the Redstone updates to 1803 or 1809 after installing the drive? Did you partition the new drive at all before doing anything like that?

That would be the only way I could see that happening as the major 10 updates tend to reinstall Windows and if a new unpartitioned drive was present it would install the boot manager to the secondary drive. It is a security measure as Windows tries to keep the boot manager away from the main drive as to keep viruses away.
 
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Why not disconnect the new drive and just boot from the old drive ?

Once it's clear that the old drive remains bootable, if you want a dual boot system, disconnect it and install windows on the new drive. If what you want is a clean new drive, then , again with the old drive disconnected, install windows on the new drive up to the point where you pick a disk to install, where you can delete all the partitions on the new drive. Delete them and then shut down the system. Now you have a clean new drive and a working NVMe.

Bob is yours.
 
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I am not sure that will work. The old drive doesn't show anything but a single partition. That means that if he disconnects the new drive it probably wont boot as it has no boot manager.

The only way to have a single partition with 10 (or 8.1 or 7 for that matter) is to use an imaging software to create it.

https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-software/fix-uefi-boot-in-windows-10-8-7.html

He can try that but as I said its not an easy task to do for novice Windows users. I typically only use this if I need to fix a single drive that had a boot record get corrupted or destroyed by a virus. In his case he will need to re-partition parts of the drive for the boot record.
 
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And I already asked him to confirm the partitions:

"It shows
Windows Boot Manager (New Hard Drive)
Old Hard Drive"

Thats what he sees. He stated his old drive shows one partition. A normal Windows 10 install would have normally 3 partitions, the Boot prtition, Recovery partition and the OS partition.
 
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