Can't boot from SSD with my Windows install without secondary HDD

My PC is a real mix of old and new parts and I currently have a problem where my 2TB mechanical HDD is failing. It is 100% active all the time, but frequently hangs or simply takes forever to browse or transfer any files, so I'm pretty sure it is on the way out. When I remove that HDD however, I can't boot my machine into Windows, even though my current install of Windows 10 Pro is on my 500GB NVME SSD. It works fine in general once I am able to boot into Windows and is super fast, but it can't boot to that SSD directly for some reason.

The 2TB HDD that is failing is from my old setup and still has an installation of Windows 7 on it. So when it is working normally I get given the option of booting into either Windows 7 or 10. Once Windows 10 is selected, booting works fine and is super fast, but without the HDD plugged in, it won't give me any options to boot to the SSD. When I try to use my recovery SSD, the startup repair is unable to do anything and I have tried one round of bootrec fixes to no avail. It seems like the boot record of some kind is actually housed on the mechanical HDD and I really need that to change somehow, preferably without needing to use that HDD as it is painfully slow to complete any task and could die at any minute.

Please help, what can I do in this instance?

It seems like the boot record of some kind is actually housed on the mechanical HDD and I really need that to change somehow, preferably without needing to use that HDD as it is painfully slow to complete any task and could die at any minute.

Yes, it sounds like that. Screenshot of disk management would be useful.

Hi SIW2

Disk management screenshot shows that the bad HDD is Disk0, has the system reserved partition and finally disk management has acknowledged that the disk is not healthy, after I tried to mirror the system reserved partition to the SSD in Disk3.



Any ideas?

What does bcdedit report?

I suspect Windows is using a boot partition on the hard drive which you need to fix.

Steve C said:

What does bcdedit report?

I suspect Windows is using a boot partition on the hard drive which you need to fix.

Hi Steve,

bcdedit shows that the Boot Manager is on D: with a boot loader each on C: and D:. Screenshot here:

Explains why when I try to use bootrec that the installation only shows at D:

Hopefully, someone will post the correct bcdedit commands to fix that and correctly configure Windows 10 /7 dual boot if you want that.

Steve C said:

Hopefully, someone will post the correct bcdedit commands to fix that and correctly configure Windows 10 /7 dual boot if you want that.

Hopefully, no need to have it dual bootable, Windows 7 was just a relic of an old machine and the drive housing it won't exist much longer!

JarrydR said:

Hopefully, no need to have it dual bootable, Windows 7 was just a relic of an old machine and the drive housing it won't exist much longer!

When you get booting from the correct drive sorted out, I would use MiniTool Partition Wizard to delete the unneeded system partitions on the secondary drives, recover the unallocated space and make any active partitions on those drives inactive.

SIW2 said:

Elevated cmd prompt:

diskpart
sel vol c
act
sel vol d
inact
exi
bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

(If H were active, you might need to inactivate it as well, depending on the boot order.)

Thank you so much! That worked perfectly, was able to unplug the dying hard drive and boot from the NVME directly. Just incase anyone reads this in the future with the same problem, there was a slight modification in what I had to do in CMD prompt:

diskpart
sel vol c
list partition
select partition (number, find the correct partition in disk management and compare to list above)
act
sel vol d
list partition
select partition (number, find the correct partition in disk management and compare to list above)
inact
exi
bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

Worked perfectly, so thank you again!

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Steve C said:

When you get booting from the correct drive sorted out, I would use MiniTool Partition Wizard to delete the unneeded system partitions on the secondary drives, recover the unallocated space and make any active partitions on those drives inactive.

Thank you, I've just removed the failing drive altogether and the two new secondary drives are all allocated and are not active. Cheers for your help!