My PC has three drives: An SSD on which I installed Windows 10, an HDD on which Windows 7 was installed and a a hybrid drive on which no OS was installed although it is formatted.
Right now, the HDD with Windows 7 is primary and I’m always asked if I want to use Windows 7 or Windows 10 when I boot up the computer. I also think that my bootup times are limited by the slowness of the HDD.
I want to make the SSD with Windows 10 my only boot drive and disconnect my HDD.
So I go into the BIOS and select the SSD as my boot drive, easy, right? It says there’s a disk boot failure every time I try it. I have no problems using the SSD otherwise.
I tried only leaving the SSD connected but no.
So I switch SATA cables around and put the SSD into the SATA 3 0 motherboard port. Disk boot failure.
The boot loader was on the disk containing Windows 7. When you removed that disk, you left the system with no way to find and boot Windows 10. I don’t know what the procedure is for correcting that since the last time I dealt with dual booting was back in the Windows 2000 days and AFAIK Windows vista and later are different.
If you start the BIOS rather than your operating system, one of the options somewhere is “Boot order” which determines which drive is used for startup.
Yes and when I choose the SSD on which Windows 10 is installed as 1st drive to boot, the BIOS tells me about a disk boot failure. The BIOS has no difficult finding the SSD when the HDD is in first place in the boot order.
Putting the boot loader on a particular drive rather than the BIOS/UEFI seems like a silly thing to do.
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it’s always been done that way. In order for things to be reasonably “Standard,” the boot code for the OS has to be in a known location for the system firmware to find it and point the CPU at it to execute. When you installed Windows 7, it put its bootloader on the active partition of the primary drive. When you added a drive and installed Windows 10, it modified the existing bootloader on the first drive to contain pointers to both Windows 7 and Windows 10. when you removed the primary drive, you lost the bootloader entirely so the system has no idea where to look for Windows 10. You need to do some sort of boot repair to try to get Windows 10 to boot.
besides, letting an OS randomly write to system firmware is extremely dangerous, especially with as much as UEFI is capable of doing.
it’s always been done that way. In order for things to be reasonably “Standard,” the boot code for the OS has to be in a known location for the system firmware to find it and point the CPU at it to execute.
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BUT Microsoft could have ensured that the boot code was written to the SSD on which Windows 10 lives, when it was installing windows 10, as well updating config the HDD where windows 7 lives, to give that config the option to boot W10 or W7 …
in theory I think UEFI would allow something like this (bootloader on each drive for its respective OS) but Windows still has to work with a ton of systems out there using legacy BIOS which would NOT work with this.
is “Boot order” which determines which drive is used for startup.