Error adding a 2nd internal hard drive

zbrufan813 · 21 May 2017

I was replacing My son' old computer and I decided to remove the HD and put it into my case for extra storage/back-up. When I start or restart the computer I get a screen I have never seen before on this computer. It is the American Maegtrends bios screen I believe. I've seen similar on older computers but haven't in quite a while. Down toward the bottom, it has an error saying Smart status bad, backup or replace, hit f-1 to enter setup. I believe it is doing this because it is trying to load off the 2nd drive but don't understand why it doesn't revert to the 1st drive. Then I go into the boot options then boot priority and disabled all except the correct internal drive. All my external drives were showing in the list as well. Again I get the same screen when I restart. I am able to go into the boot menu and select the correct drive and windows loads.
I went into disk management The 2nd drive was showing as active/primary partition. Oddly the C drive (the correct drive) was also showing as active/primary partition. I formatted the 2nd drive (both quick and regular format) and still get the same error on restart. I deleted the partition and created a new and still no help. Even after creating the new partition it was still showing active/primary. I looked for help online and the most popular fix was to open the command prompt and run DISKPART and typing a few commands. After doing this it no longer says active, but it still says primary. The correct drive also says primary but not active. When I right click it to try and make it active the "mark partition as active" is grayed out and I cannot select it. The 2nd drive is working as I can add files or folders to it. I am kind of at a loss her on what to do next.
Extra info just in case. The computer is an ASUS CM6730 running Win 10 64 bit. The correct drive is a Western Digital WDC10EZEX-22RKKA0. The 2nd drive is a Samsung HD753LJ. Both drives are SATA. There are 6 SATA ports on the MB. 2 SATA 6G at the bottom (the Correct C drive is plugged into the right) Just above those is t more SATA 6G the DVD drive is plugged into the left. Then there are 2 SATA 3G above that those were both empty. I have tried plugging the 2nd drive into all 4 of the unused ports hoping, all be it unsuccessfully, that would make a difference.
The 4 images in the attachments are the drive info for the 2 internal drives obtained through Speccy. Samsung 1 + 2 is the 2nd drive I am adding and WD 1 + 2 is the original internal drive.

TV2 · 21 May 2017

Newer systems with UEFI BIOS and hard disks formatted GPT do not use the legacy "Active" partition method for starting Windows. They use the Windows Boot Manager instead. So on your "correct drive" the C partition will not and should not be marked active.

If there is no data on the new (old) hard drive from your son's PC that you need to keep or have not backed up then you could try wiping the hard drive clean. This will also erase any partition flags that ,may be causing your problem.

To do this you can use Diskpart. The commands to type are:

List Disk > Enter

(Review the disks to determine which disk is the one you want to erase. Be sure!! Note that disks number.)

select disk # > Enter (where # is the number you KNOW is the correct hard drive)
clean all > Enter (this starts the wiping process. This can take some time on a large disk. Go make dinner)

After this you will have a blank, unallocated, unformatted hard drive. When you start the system with this hard disk also attached it should go right into Windows (from "correct disk"). You can then use Disk Management to initialize and Format the drive, plus create any partitions.

If you have the same problem with the wiped disk then there is a hardware problem going on. Post back.

TV2 · 21 May 2017

How old is the hard drive from your son's computer?

zbrufan813 · 21 May 2017

I'm not sure of the age of the drive from my son's computer. If I had to guess I'd say probably about 5 years. I have tried deleting the partition and creating a new and reformatting. I'm guessing this is not the same as using clean all command. I will try the clean all command and report results. Thx for the suggestion

zbrufan813 · 21 May 2017

I did the clean all as suggested. By the way, I had dinner dessert, and a few cocktails before it finished. Well, maybe it was finished by the first but I decided to have 2 more. LOL After it finished I created a new partition and formatted it the regular format not the quick. After formatting, both are showing up as primary partition again. Restarted and it still tries to boot from the empty drive even though the main drive is the only one in the boot order options. 1 thing I noticed is the 2nd drive is showing as Disk 0 and the original is Disk 1. Somewhere along the line, I thought I remember hearing someone say that the main bootable drive should be Disk 0. If so would that make a difference and if yes how do I change that. I know back in the old days there used to be jumpers to set as primary/secondary and master/slave etc... But now with the new SATA drives, I thought that was done with.

CountMike · 22 May 2017

zbrufan813 said:

I did the clean all as suggested. By the way, I had dinner dessert, and a few cocktails before it finished. Well, maybe it was finished by the first but I decided to have 2 more. LOL After it finished I created a new partition and formatted it the regular format not the quick. After formatting, both are showing up as primary partition again. Restarted and it still tries to boot from the empty drive even though the main drive is the only one in the boot order options. 1 thing I noticed is the 2nd drive is showing as Disk 0 and the original is Disk 1. Somewhere along the line, I thought I remember hearing someone say that the main bootable drive should be Disk 0. If so would that make a difference and if yes how do I change that. I know back in the old days there used to be jumpers to set as primary/secondary and master/slave etc... But now with the new SATA drives, I thought that was done with.

There are no jumpers like in olden days of PATA/IDE drives to make them slave or master or disk 0 or 1, all's done in BIOS with SATA drives. Only way to make a disk 0 or 1 or..... is to connect it to first SATA port on the MB. Not much benefits of it being first disk, maybe a second or two during BIOS POST because it looks at it first and in case you have to reset BIOS it would default to it as first BOOT device without any intervention.

TV2 · 22 May 2017

There is no issue with the partitions being Primary. New systems with GPT formatted disks only use Primary partitions.

And with modern SATA controllers there is no benefit to the order the disks are listed. When the system starts it is looking for the Windows Boot Manager on any drive connected to the PC. This is nearly instantaneous even if you had 6 disks connected.
In addition, the number that Windows assigns to a hard disk does not necessarily correspond to what SATA connector that drive is connected to.

So both are red herrings. We need to look at other possibilities.

TV2 · 22 May 2017

When you initialized the old drive after the clean all, did you choose MBR or GPT?

CountMike · 22 May 2017

TV2 said:

There is no issue with the partitions being Primary. New systems only use Primary partitions.

And with modern SATA controllers there is no benefit to the order the disks are listed. When the system starts it is looking for the Windows Boot Manager on any drive connected to the PC. This is nearly instantaneous even if you had 6 disks connected.
In addition, the number that Windows assigns to a hard disk does not necessarily correspond to what SATA connector that drive is connected to.

So both are red herrings. We need to look at other possibilities.

It's "Looking for" that can take few seconds at most but it's there unless it's on disk 0.

clam1952 · 22 May 2017

The problem disk maybe has a boot sector? I had that issue reusing a disk I had been using for Linux so initially just removed it from the boot order list in the bios.