New
#1
Fixing an inadvertent dual boot of Windows 10
My original boot drive for this computer was failing. Apparently a memory chip had also gone bad, which certainly complicated things further. (I suffered through a day with one blue screen of death after another -- my computer could not stay booted for longer than 30 seconds before it would crash with a number of different error messages. Once I could get into safe mode, it was stable for a bit longer.) At any rate, I made a USB install disk for Windows 10 on another machine, but the only way I could get my computer to boot from the USB was to get to Windows first and THEN go into recovery mode and tell it to boot from the USB drive. Once I did that, I installed a fresh version of Windows 10 onto a new, much larger drive.
Eventually I want to get rid of the old drive, since it's been unreliable (damaged sectors and files, can't be repaired through chkdsk, etc.). In fact, I'm ready to reformat it now. But I'm afraid that my computer is still using the old drive for booting and that Windows 10 -- when it was installed onto the new drive -- didn't install the necessary boot partition for my new drive to boot as a solo operation.
I think this because my computer will not boot unless I force it to go to the BIOS first and then exit. If I don't go to the BIOS, it just sort of hangs there with no activity and never makes it as far as a Windows logon screen (or even a choice of boot options). If I press F10 to force it to bring up the BIOS set-up menu, once that loads I just need to exit without making any changes and then the computer will boot into the new Win10 partition on the new drive.
When I look at disk management, it shows me one large partition for my new drive which is defined as "Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)". The old failing drive is subdivided into 6 partitions, 3 of which are labeled Recovery, one is Primary, and the other is the EFI System Partition. I'm thinking the EFI System Partition is what needed to be on my new drive.
How do I fix this? Or do I need to fix this?
This has been a saga of one headache after another... the failed boot drive, the failed memory, having to refresh Windows again on the newer hard drive (because apparently the memory fault corrupted both my Windows 10 new installation as well as totally trashed an external hard drive which was previously fine). So I want to make sure I don't cause any further headaches for myself by doing the wrong thing. If I can use the Windows Disk Management tool to fix things, I'll need step-by-step instructions since I've never partitioned (or re-partitioned) a hard drive before.
Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.