[SOLVED] Windows won't boot on this PC despite the drive booting fine on another.

[LG18]

Hi.

I’m having trouble booting into windows on a PC using a 1TB hard drive.

This PC had been working fine with this drive previously, but yesterday I used it to install windows on another hard drive.

I installed windows on this new drive using the USB ISO method. When I was finished I took out the hard drive I had just installed windows on and replaced it with the original one (the case only supports space for one drive). Now that the old drive is back in, windows does not boot and I get the message ** Reboot and select proper boot device. Insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key**. It wouldn’t recognise the drive, so I tried the drive in another PC which booted perfectly. I put the drive back in the PC it wouldn’t boot from and also inserted the USB flash drive I used to install windows on the other drive. The system booted now displaying the windows install screen.

I went into the BIOS and found that the boot order was ordered to boot from the flash drive as first priority. I changed this so that the drive I wanted to boot from was first, but got the message above yet again.

I’m not a really sure how to sort it, it just won’t recognise it’s original drive as a boot device despite it being visible on the BIOS. There’s nothing wrong with the drive as it works in other systems and boots into windows fine. Obviously something has been altered presumably at the bios level when I used this computer to install windows on the other drive, but what I don’t know.

Does anyone know what to do?

Many thanks!

 

[britechguy]

I really don't know quite how to respond here.

You cannot install Windows 10 except to a drive. You describe putting flip flopping drives between machines, and it sounds like you tried to install Windows to an external drive.

I'm also not clear as to what you are stating by "the ISO method." If you downloaded the ISO file you would still need to have created either a USB thumb drive or DVD optical media to use to install Windows 10 to a hard drive on the system with that same hard drive in place when doing so.

See any of the following instruction sets, and follow the one of your choosing.
Doing a completely clean reinstall (options a & b are downloadable PDF files):
a) Completely Clean Win10 (Re)install Using MCT to Download Win10 ISO File
b) Completely Clean Win10 (Re)install Using MCT to Create a Bootable USB Drive
c) How to do a CLEAN Installation of Windows 10 (Tom’s Hardware Forums, with screen shots)

 

[LG18]

I really don't know quite how to respond here.

You cannot install Windows 10 except to a drive. You describe putting flip flopping drives between machines, and it sounds like you tried to install Windows to an external drive.

I'm also not clear as to what you are stating by "the ISO method." If you downloaded the ISO file you would still need to have created either a USB thumb drive or DVD optical media to use to install Windows 10 to a hard drive on the system with that same hard drive in place when doing so.

See any of the following instruction sets, and follow the one of your choosing.
Doing a completely clean reinstall (options a & b are downloadable PDF files):
a) Completely Clean Win10 (Re)install Using MCT to Download Win10 ISO File
b) Completely Clean Win10 (Re)install Using MCT to Create a Bootable USB Drive
c) How to do a CLEAN Installation of Windows 10 (Tom’s Hardware Forums, with screen shots)

Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear, finding it difficult to word it properly.
Let me try again:

So there's Drive 1 and Drive 2 to make it simple.
I built a PC a couple of months ago and installed windows using a USB flash drive. Windows installed onto that PC's 1TB hard drive. This is Drive 1.
A couple of months later and on a different computer, I needed to do a re-install of windows but didn't want to lose all my files (I know you can have the option to keep your files but this HD needed wiping, windows was corrupted). The drive I would be wiping is Drive 2. Windows wouldn't even boot and I just got a blue screen, so I needed to somehow access the files on the drive to save before wiping it. The only way to do this was to boot windows from a different drive and then access Drive 2 as an external device rather than a boot device, and simply move my files over from it to a working drive before wiping it and reinstalling windows.

I took Drive 1 out of the first PC I mentioned building a couple of months ago and used it momentarily as a boot drive in the other computer, in order to do what I explained above. Then I wiped Drive 2 and reinstalled windows on it, and once installed moved the data I'd saved on Drive 1 back over to Drive 2.
Now I had windows back up and running on Drive 2 and with all my data back on there, so I returned Drive 1 to its original PC, but got the aforementioned message.

For some reason, since using Drive 1 in a different computer, I can't boot into windows.
"Reboot and select proper boot device. Insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" is the message, but windows is installed on that drive and it was working fine before.
I know it hasn't been corrupted or anything because it boots into windows fine on the other computer.
Drive 1 is visible in the BIOS and I can select it as number 1 in the boot chain, but I just always get that message.

Many thanks!

 

[britechguy]

To be perfectly honest, I have no answer for you as to what caused this. It is not conventional, even before the era of Windows 10, to take the system drive from one machine, plonk that in to another, boot from it on that other machine, and then try to move it back.

Windows has always set things up based upon the hardware that is found in the system upon which it is being installed. Unless those systems are hardware twins (and I wouldn't recommend the "temporary transplant" even then) you are likely to have issues with anything that is not using a generic driver.

In any case, my suspicion is that something occurred during that period of transplantation that has screwed up your boot sector in some way such that the original machine no longer recognizes it.

Your best bet is probably going to be a variant of what you did to get the second machine going. I'd take Drive 1 out, connect it as an external device, extract all user data that you need from it, then do a completely clean Windows 10 reinstall once it's back in the machine where you want it to run.

Regardless of what's causing this, starting from scratch with the drive in the actual "hardware milieu" that it's intended to be the system drive for lets you get everything back in place correctly and is least likely to have any lingering problems.

Others may have different advice. You'll have to decide how you wish to proceed.

 

[SkyNetRising]

So there's Drive 1 and Drive 2 to make it simple.

Can you put both drives in the computer, that can boot into windows, and
show screenshot from Disk Management?

 

[LG18]

To be perfectly honest, I have no answer for you as to what caused this. It is not conventional, even before the era of Windows 10, to take the system drive from one machine, plonk that in to another, boot from it on that other machine, and then try to move it back.

Windows has always set things up based upon the hardware that is found in the system upon which it is being installed. Unless those systems are hardware twins (and I wouldn't recommend the "temporary transplant" even then) you are likely to have issues with anything that is not using a generic driver.

In any case, my suspicion is that something occurred during that period of transplantation that has screwed up your boot sector in some way such that the original machine no longer recognizes it.

Your best bet is probably going to be a variant of what you did to get the second machine going. I'd take Drive 1 out, connect it as an external device, extract all user data that you need from it, then do a completely clean Windows 10 reinstall once it's back in the machine where you want it to run.

Regardless of what's causing this, starting from scratch with the drive in the actual "hardware milieu" that it's intended to be the system drive for lets you get everything back in place correctly and is least likely to have any lingering problems.

Others may have different advice. You'll have to decide how you wish to proceed.

I see. Thanks for the reply. I was unaware of the dangers regarding this. I didn't know the install of Windows created such a relationship between OS and machine.
Maybe I'll have to re-install as you say, then.

 

[LG18]

Can you put both drives in the computer, that can boot into windows, and
show screenshot from Disk Management?

I'll give this a shot tomorrow when I have access to the computer and get back to you. Many thanks!

 

[britechguy]

I didn't know the install of Windows created such a relationship between OS and machine.

It's not just Windows, but in the case of Windows 10 your digital license is tied to the motherboard of the machine on which the license was originally activated. This has been true since Day One of Windows 10.

But for any OS, it has to create such a relationship. When it is installing part of that is interrogating the hardware to see what's there as part of selecting and installing the correct drivers to make it all work. It's part and parcel of what an operating system installer does.

If I'm installing Windows 10 on this HP Laptop I'm typing from, that has an AMD A12-9700P APU, the chipset drivers that are used for the processor are entirely different than what would be selected for, say, a system that has an Intel i5 (any generation) processor in it. The same is true for all sorts of other hardware like optical drives, WiFi cards, etc.

An operating system must, by definition, operate the hardware it's been installed to control. An intimate relationship gets created in every case, for every OS. Even those that are bootable OSes that reside only on a USB drive like some versions of Linux still have to go through the whole "what hardware have I got here?" setup sequence every time they're booted.