Win 10 Pro Dell T3600 Won't Boot to Desktop, Goes To Advanced Recovery

@FirstLast, excellent solution. Thank you.

Regarding the Dell PowerEdge T310, your system supports up to four internal hot-swap 3.5-inch SAS or SATA hard drives, or 2.5-inch internal hot-swap SAS or SSD hard drives in 3.5-inch hot-swap hard-drive carrier. It also supports up to four 3.5-inch cabled SAS or SATA internal hard drives.

Look here under "Raid Controller" https://www.dell.com/downloads/globa...c_Sheet_en.pdf and you'll see that a number of different Raid controller choices are available for the T310. People can choose from those options at time of purchase.

Some people order a PERC Raid controller which is Raid only and others don't purchase them choosing to use the onboard software Raid that supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and non-RAID volumes. You need to determine what you have.

Go to Support Dell at Support | Dell US and type in the service tag of the T310. Look at the original configuration to see what hard drive controller it originally shipped with and then let it detect your PC and tell you what hard drive controller is in the current configuration. Unless someone modified the computer after purchase, they will be the same. Step one is figuring out what hard drive controller(s) is installed.

P.S. Looking at the manual is also helpful (go to page 144 and look at the Sata/SSD connectors directly on the motherboard, then look at page 160 onward): Support for PowerEdge T310 | Manuals & documents | Dell US

Ztruker said:

I have a Dell PowerEdge T310 that has the same PERC H310 controller (I think). It came with a 500GB SATA 7.2K drive that I was able to install Windows 7 Home X64 on then upgrade to Windows 10 X64. I want to replace an old, old Dell I use at the shop with this PowerEdge computer. I moved a 500GB SATA 7.2K drive from the old PC to the new PowerEdge and ran into my first contact with hardware RAID.

I don't want a RAID setup, I want two separate 500GB drives that have multiple partitions on them. Drive 0, the Win 10 boot drive will have C: and maybe eventually another partition, right now it's just C:. The 2nd 500GB drive is partitioned into D: and E: where I keep stuff I use at the shop, drivers, programs, etc.

When I put the 2nd drive in it was not seen at all, not even in BIOS so I will need to do something with it in th4e PERC controller to activate it and perhaps initialize it. I'm guessing this means I need to do an image backup first that I restore once I have it accessible.

Any guidance appreciated, especially since you've just gone through all this.

I would suggest pulling any hard drive controller card(s) plugged into the slots on your motherboard present and simply using the SATA connectors on the motherboard (see them on page 144 of the owners manual) for a non-raid hard drive installation. That's what I would do. Connect the hard drives directly to the mother board using SATA cables, connect the power cables from the power supply to the hard drives, and then reboot and see if the hard drives are all recognized. If not, configure the computer bios appropriately. You won't need to go into any raid controller card setup utility or anything like that. It's just the hardware and the bios.

Ztruker said:

@FirstLast, thank you. I'll check the Dell site Tuesday as I don't have the service tag here at home.
It has 4 places places for the hot swap SATA drives but only 3 of them have the hot swap caddy (1 through 3), 4 is unused.

I'll do the reading and investigation, many thanks.

I'm hoping to end up with a non-RAID setup.

Two hard drives plugged into the motherboard using SATA cables with the power cables from the power supply also connected to the hard drives. Any issues, resolve in the bios. That's all you need and want. Keep it simple. Good luck.

Ztruker said:

That makes sense. I'll check it Tuesday. Thanks again.

This will make a sweet work system for the shop once it's setup. Quad core 2.5Ghz, 16GB RAM, 2x500GB 7.2K drives. I may even add a sound card.

If I can get this working the way I want, I have another just like it that I will use to replace the other shop computer, another older Dell. Both were donated.

I didn't think of it before but after initializing a drive in a RAID controller card utility, they won't automatically work with a non-raid controller card or plugged directly into the motherboard via sata cables and configured in the motherboard's bios. They would need to be reformatted for FAT32 or NTFS, for example.

Of course, your hard drives were already RAID initialized so they worked fine when you attached them to the RAID controller and created new virtual group for them.

Well, we're all learning together. Thank you for reporting this back, now I know that I'd have to reformat a RAID initialized drive to use it with a non-RAID motherboard (configuring them in the bios) or an after market non-RAID add-on hard drive controller card. Makes sense now.

So, for use with Windows operating systems:

1. If you wish to use a hard drive with a RAID controller card you must connect the hard drive to the RAID controller and initialize it in the RAID controller card utility if it has not been previously initialized for use with RAID.

2. If you wish to use a hard drive with a non-RAID controller card, you must connect the hard drive to the non-RAID controller card and format it with NTFS (preferred) or FAT32.

3. If you wish to use a hard drive as non-RAID with the motherboard, then you must connect the hard drive to the motherboard SATA slots and format them with NTFS (preferred) or FAT32.

The type of formatting matters and also remember that when you format a hard drive you lose the data that's present on that hard drive. So if you are trying to save the data on the hard drive, do NOT format the hard drive but find a way to attach it to whatever will recognize it so that you can copy the data out safely to a backup. In your case this was as easy as attaching the RAID initialized hard drive back to the RAID controller card and adding it to a new virtual group.

Ztruker said:

The Dell PowerEdge T310 has a PERC 700 Raid Controller.

Couldn't figure out how to connect the drives directly to the system board SATA ports so I deleted the existing RAID Group 0 and created two new groups with one drive in each group. That seems to have worked and I didn't lose the Win 10 Home I had already installed on the 500GB drive.

Partitioned the new 1TB drive (instead of a 2nd 500GB) and it's ready to load the data from the old Dell Precision 690. Once that's done I'll swap the two computers then do some testing, but overall it looks real good.
Many thanks for your help @FirstLast.