Laptop back from repair, windows won't load.

Hello,

I recently sent my laptop back for some warranty work. It came with a 500GB Lite-ON SSD, and I installed a 1TB NVME 960. I was running the OS off of the 1TB Drive. I pulled that drive before I sent the laptop in for repair. I know that they formatted and reinstalled windows on the stock 500GB SSD. I have formatted that drive so it is now blank.

I just go the laptop back, popped in my 1TB. Now it doesn't recognize it as an OS drive...not even an option in the boot menu. I'm assuming there's a boot file somewhere that needs to be updated?

I have a win 10 recovery stick that I can use (I already tried startup repair, and it is not picking up the Win 10 install on that).

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks everyone!

P.S. The 1TB drive was showing up as active and searchable in Windows installation, and recovery.

I have a hunch that the boot, grub, or whatever it is called, Windows Boot settings were saved on the Lite-On 500GB drive, and that's where the instructions were stored that indicated a valid windows installation was sitting on my 1TB NVME?

 

What probably has happened is when you installed Windows back then, because you didn't disconnect the 2nd drive while installing, Windows has this nasty habit of installing the boot files on the 2nd drive if it finds one that is partitioned and ready for action.

So now that you popped back your OS drive, while Windows is there, the boot files were on the other drive and hence you don't have a boot loader.

The only thing you can do now is format.


In the future, when installing Windows, either make sure you only have one drive connected to the system which is the drive you want to install Windows on or see my little trick to get around this without having to physically remove the 2nd drive:

How to properly install Windows on a system with multiple drives

 

F, lol.

That's what I figured. I have all my files on the other drive, but it's all the freaking software. Use this as production at work, and I have probably 30 different application that need installed and set up X).

There's no way to recreate the boot file with BCDedit or anything?

 

not that I've tried or researched to be honest so I'm not going to sit here and make myself look like I know how to do it. Feel free to research I know how it can be a pain in the butt to reinstall all those apps. I have so many apps myself and inserting the license keys and activating them is ughhhhh.

Anyway, for the future, now you know how to have your boot files on your main drive, not only will it create boot issues, but if the boot files were on the 2nd drive and that 2nd drive was an HDD, then you'd also experience slower boot times and thirdly, it will make backing your system as an image using something like Macrium Reflect useless because think of it, you backup C: and the preceding partitions before the Windows one like system and recovery right? one day you come to restore, you restore them but since the boot files were on D: and weren't backed up, you may run into issues even with the restoration.

 

Yeah, I was pretty sure that this is what happened. In fact, I'm almost positive. Thanks for the explanation.

 

This worked!
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-rebuild-the-bcd-in-windows-2624508

Namely:
bootrec /rebuildbcd

My next step is to remove the 500GB disk, and see if I can repair the bcd to save on my big drive.

Thanks!

 

oh wow! so were you able to finally boot into Windows?

 

Indeed. Typing from this installation right now. =]

I am going to try and remove the 500GB drive and see if I can get this installation repaired onto this drive only.