A bit of a odd one. System Motherboard - Gigabyte Z77-D3H CPU - i5 3570K Crucial_CT500MX2 SCSI Disk Device (SSD) with windows 10 & programs. (C) 2TB Western Digital WDC WD20EFRX-68AX9N0 SCSI Disk Device (SATA) for backup. (D) I unplugged the WD Hard drive and when I attempted to boot I got 'bootmgr missing'. I reconnected the WD drive but still coultn't boot the PC. I run start up repair and this couldn't fix the issue. I then restored an image which worked. I have never had this happen before. Why would disconnecting the D drive cause the PC not to boot? Thanks for any help in understanding what happened.
If it was in port 0 then it's possible that a system partition ended up on it during the OS install. The result would be exactly what you describe as it would not be able to find the files on startup. Start Disk Management and look for where the System Reserved partitions are. If they're not all on the same disk as C: then that's (likely) the issue.
The ssd is connected to port 0 not the hard drive. I have removed the D drive in the past without issue. Boot order in Bios is OK, Checked that as well. My system has been running well without issues for a long time. Makes me weary of attempting to swap drives etc
When unplugging the WD drive you didn't happen to knock either of the cables loose for the SSD did you?
Windows has an issue putting the boot manager on a secondary drive when you leave it connected during the install. That’s your issue. A fix boot doesn’t always actually fix the issue, either. It’s a nightmare. Always disconnect any - bar the OS - drive during an install to avoid hassles like this in the future.
I have removed the D drive in the past without issue. When I reconnected the D drive the issue remained
Because taking it out and then putting it back has probably knocked it from being the primary hard drive. Go into bios and make sure it is the primary hard drive. I've had this a few times recently and panicked before realising it takes about two seconds to fix. If it is not in your boot list at all you may need to shuffle it under HDD BBS properties. See if that fixes it
Still trying to understand what is going on. Here is a screen shot from Disk Management https://ibb.co/cinbRS Which shows the the C drive is the boot drive When I searched the D drive I found the following https://ibb.co/iDct6S Which seems to indicate that the boot files are indeed on D drive. Can someone help me understand what is going on? Thanks
Has Windows been installed on that D: drive in the past? I'm probably wrong but it looks like you used to have Windows installed on the 1.8GB D: drive (HDD?) and at some point got an SSD and reinstalled Windows on your new SSD. After you installed Windows on the SSD did you delete the old Windows partition on the HDD and then extended the hidden system reserved partition and assigned it a drive letter.
I often find with boot problems that after running the startup repair which fails the first time rebooting and running it again fixes the problem. Admittedly that might be a peculiarity of my systems.
I'm not sure greshoff has a problem per se, (s)he's just trying to understand why disconnecting the D: drive caused the PC to not boot when in the past (s)he's done the same thing and it didn't cause problems. It's not really something we, or probably anyone other than greshoff, can fully answer IMO as to answer why the system reserved boot partition is on the larger of the two drives and takes up the entire partition would require knowledge of the history of any partition related manipulation like what drives Windows has been installed on, what setting where used when writing an image back to a drive, if an partition management software has been used to expand, delete, or move partitions and stuff like that.
