My system has two physical drives, both drives have Windows 10 Pro 64-installed:
Disk 0 started out its life as Windows 7 Pro 64-bit OS, while the other as Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit OS.
This has been working just fine, albeit Disk 0 had not been booted for a long time; trying to boot this version of Windows 10 fails.
Would assigning a drive letter fix the booting issue?
If not, is there a way to restore Disk 0's boot record?
TIA...
Drive letters is assigned by the OS you have booted to a partition.
The answer is no, assigning a drive letter Wont fix the booting issue.
Shut down, detach drive 1 (1T SSD) (detach SATA or power cable) and boot from a Win 10 installation drive and do a boot repair.
I was afraid that you'd say that...
This system also has three other drives and as such, there are four drives to diconnect.
Maybe just assign a drive letter, create and image with MR first, then mess around with couple of option to restore the boot record...
Assign a drive letter to it and then run:
bcdboot X:\Windows /s X: /f ALL
Replace both X: above with the drive letter you assign.
There is no need to disconnect other drives but you will have to select that disk to boot from in your BIOS boot override menu.
Thanks...
That seemed like the way to go and ran the command:
Booting to the "E" drive via the BIOS afterward, shows this:
Booting to the USB installation disk wasn't much help either:
Well, it is helpful, but...
Both Windows 10 installation have MR and its system recovery option active. The question is, which installation of Windows 10 the startup repair referencing? Maybe that's determined by the boot order in the BIOS, or maybe by the disk #, such as "Disk 0". It's hard to tell...
Disconnecting "Disk 1" from the system should clear this up. It's not my favored thing to do, but there seems to have no other option.
PS: Thank you for your service NavyLCDR and wish you a great Veteran Day....
Your Windows installation on that drive is corrupted. You'll need to backup files you want to keep and reinstall Windows on that drive.
I don't doubt that, albeit both the other installation of Windows on "Disk 1" and MR have no issues with accessing the files. The latter one is imaging "Disk 0" at the moment.
Oh well, once the drive is imaged, will try updating/reparing the OS on "Drive 0", after disconnecting "Drive 1". Just in case it would work; the option of reinstalling Windows is my last choice...
As the drive 0 has corrupted files, do a disk check.
Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and if you want to schedule to next start = yes
Restart
Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc
It's too late for that, even if the disk check may had fixed the issue. Maybe not...
Updating the OS from the USB installation disk didn't work, the setup needs to run within the OS.
Repair didn't work either, so, installed it over the damaged Win 10 OS. Interestingly, MR rescue system is still available, after the installation had been completed:
Not only it remained in the boot menu, it also works. So much for not savings any programs...
On the other hand, the Intel NIC didn't work. Depite the fact that Windows updated files during installation and activated Windows. The chances are that I'll reinstall Windows again, but at this time will format the drive first.
Thank you all for your help....
Quote
