Newly installed 2nd internal hard drive causes boot failure

I am running Win 10 64 bit, version 1803.
I have just added a second internal drive to my system. It displays in Admin as Drive E 298.08 Gb, NTFS healthy, page file, active, primary partition, layout simple, type basic).

With the second drive E: installed my boot drive C: only boots intermittenly, but only after removing & reconnecting E: to the motherboard with the system in a live state.
I have spent probably 2 solid continuous hours with microsoft chat support with 3 different techs but none has been able to resolve the issue.
The only off the cuff comments from one of the techs is that the boot drive C: is possibly confused because it believes it is seeing a second operating system on the new drive, whereas it wants to see only a "storage drive".
The techs have tried to configure the drive remotely but unsuccessfully and without telling me what the properties of the new storage? drive should be, so I'm none the wiser how to get it to work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome to the forum. Can you post a screenshot from disk management showing all details. If you first hd is MBR then the new drive will give problems as it's set to active which means it's bootable

Hopefully you don't have any data on the second drive because this procedure will erase it:
Open a command prompt or powershell and run:

diskpart <- answer the admin prompt this produces if you did not open command prompt as administrator
list disk
select disk # <- replace # with the actual number for the second hard drive
clean <- this will erase the selected hard drive, make sure you have the second hard drive selected above!
convert gpt
create part pri
format fs=NTFS quick
assign
exit
exit

That will erase the second hard drive, convert it to gpt partitioning type. If you are booting with legacy BIOS, this will prevent the BIOS from possibly seeing it as a boot drive. Then create a partition on the drive, format it as NTFS and assign it the next available drive letter.

Samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. Can you post a screenshot from disk management showing all details. If you first hd is MBR then the new drive will give problems as it's set to active which means it's bootable

Disk management capture as requested. Thanks for your help.

dalpets said:

Disk management capture as requested. Thanks for your help.

The problem is that you have the second disk installed on the lowest numbered SATA port on the motherboard and it does have an active partition set on it. The BIOS is going to look at the drives installed starting with the lowest number first looking for active partitions and it finds one on drive E: above, which isn't a valid Windows installation. (unless you have changed the boot priority in BIOS).

I would recommend first swapping the data cables on the two drives so drive E: gets put on the higher numbered SATA port. Then remove the active flag from the drive E:. Also probably want to disable the pagefile on drive E:. Finally, you have almost half of your primary drive not being used - "unallocated".

NavyLCDR said:

I would recommend first swapping the data cables on the two drives so drive E: gets put on the higher numbered SATA port. Then remove the active flag from the drive E:. Also probably want to disable the pagefile on drive E:. Finally, you have almost half of your primary drive not being used - "unallocated".

How do I remove the active flag & disable the pagefile from drive E:?
disk C: properties says I have 42.1gb of 164Gb free. Why then in disk management does C: show what appears to be an unallocated partition of 132.89. I'm sure I didn't set things up originally that way. How can I now allocate that space?
Thanks again.

The easiest method is going to be with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free:
Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free

Note that when you click the download button on the link above, it is probably going to open a new tab. Close the new tab that opens, and then you will find the save as dialog box at the bottom of the previous tab the download button was on.

Then in MiniTool, you can right click on the E: drive partition and select Set Inactive in the menu. Click apply (Upper left corner, menu item). Then right click on your C: drive partition and select Extend. In the next window, select Unallocated Space from the drop down list. Make sure to move the slider all the way to the right to add all of the unallocated space to C: drive. Then click OK and then the apply button. MiniTool will tell you it has to restart the computer, let that happen, some scary DOS type screens will appear when you restart - don't worry about it, let MiniTool do it's thing.

To disable the pagefile on E: drive click on the Start icon, type the word Performance. In the list that appears click on System (Control Panel). Then in the left pane click Advanced System Settings. Click the Settings Button under Performance. Click the Advanced Tab. Under Virtual Memory, click Change. In the list click on E: drive. Click on the dot for No Paging File, click Set.

NavyLCDR said:

Open a command prompt or powershell and run:

diskpart <- answer the admin prompt this produces if you did not open command prompt as administrator
list disk
select disk # <- replace # with the actual number for the second hard drive
clean <- this will erase the selected hard drive, make sure you have the second hard drive selected above!
convert gpt
create part pri
format fs=NTFS quick
assign
exit
exit

That will erase the second hard drive, convert it to gpt partitioning type. If you are booting with legacy BIOS, this will prevent the BIOS from possibly seeing it as a boot drive. Then create a partition on the drive, format it as NTFS and assign it the next available drive letter.

This is somewhat confusing. When I open the power shell & use listdisk the volumes shown as free seem to be the reverse of what I have found them to be elsewhere in my OS. (see my thread 6) .
Shouldn't disk '0', the problematic 2nd disk be shown as mainly unused, whereas is shows only 9Mb free. Disk 1 (my original boot disk) shows 132 Gb free which it clearly does not have. Ugh!!
Thanks for your help.

dalpets said:

This is somewhat confusing. When I open the power shell & use listdisk the volumes shown as free seem to be the reverse of what I have found them to be elsewhere in my OS. (see my thread 6) .
Shouldn't disk '0', the problematic 2nd disk be shown as mainly unused, whereas is shows only 9Mb free. Disk 1 (my original boot disk) shows 132 Gb free which it clearly does not have. Ugh!!
Thanks for your help.

After seeing your disk management screen don't worry too much about diskpart. However, diskpart is showing exactly what is also showing in disk management. List Disk in diskpart is showing you how much of the drive is allocated to partitions, and the free space shown is the unallocated amount. Your disk 0 is the problem disk. It only has 9Mb free at the end of the drive which is not allocated to the E: drive partition. That's the way it should be. Your disk 1 free space of 132 Gb is that unallocated space at the end of the hard drive with C: drive that we need to add to C: drive.

The biggest problem you have is that you either need to physically swap the data cables on the two hard drives, or you need to set the boot priority order in BIOS to boot from the higher number SATA port that has the C: drive hard drive currently on it. The preferred solution would be to swap the cables so your setup would be more standard, the C: drive hard drive would be on SATA 0, and the data hard drive (E: drive) would be on SATA 1.