AOMEI Partition Assistant

Hello @donnje,

When you performed a Clean Install, did you disconnect ALL other Disks / Drives ?

 Disconnect ALL Other Disks:

It is highly recommended that you disconnect [ temporarily unplug ] ALL other Disks [ HDD's/SSD's/USB's ] BEFORE installing Windows. The reasons for this are . . .

• You CAN'T accidentally OVERWRITE a connected Disk.
• The BOOTLOADER [ boot configuration files ] will get installed on the correct Disk [ because Windows has the tendency to install the bootloader rather randomly on ANY connected Disk ], and therefore STOP problems with booting once the installation is complete.

Once the installation is complete . . .

• Check that the OS boots correctly.
• Check if the boot order in the BIOS/UEFI settings are correct [ if NOT, adjust accordingly ].
• Reconnect the other Disks.

EXPLANATION:

Windows uses a different partition structure for BIOS/UEFI. During the installation process, Windows asks which Disk / Partition you want to use for the Windows C:\ drive, it does NOT however, necessarily use the same Disk for the other Partitions, and can therefore incorrectly create the hidden recovery partition on ANY attached Disk.

Additionally, for BIOS, if another Disk is left attached, and at a latter stage you remove that Disk, you will find that the OS will NOT boot. If you check the BIOS, you will see that the OS has assigned the AHCI/RAID setting instead of the LEGACY setting and set it up as RAID, therefore breaking the boot process.

---

I hope this helps.

donnje said:

Hi,
Why the WIN disk is disk 2 and not disk 1, does this matter and how can I reverse it?

1 - it does not matter

2. Only way to reverse it is to swap drives physically or make image backups to a third drive and restore to other drive.

The numbers are, in one sense, arbitrary- simply a desgnation.

Example: I have 1 disk in this laptop.
Disk Management shows it as Disk 0.
Minitool Partition Wizard as Disk 1.

As long as your PC boots ok with just the system disk in place you're fine.