Windows 10: Boot partition issue

Background: I was planning to upgrade one of my SATA SSD's that I use for storage to another larger one. When I unplugged that SSD, my PC refused to boot, even though Windows 10 is installed on my NVMe.


With my humble knowledge in knowing how a PC boots, I came to the conclusion that the boot partition where the EFI is located in on my SATA SSD and not on my NVMe, even though Windows is installed on the latter.


In the disk management utility, a 200 MB "EFI System Partition" was indeed partitioned on the SATA SSD, and the NVMe had no such partition; it only had one partition that reads "Boot, Page File, Cache Dump, Basic Data Partition".


So my question is: Is there a way to boot without the SATA SSD without having to reinstall Windows altogether? Maybe I could somehow partition out an EFI system partition on my NVMe? Maybe that partition is completely unnecessary and I'm looking at this problem the wrong way? I also fiddled with every possible option on my BIOS regarding Legacy/UEFI boot options, and the PC only boots when the SataSSD is plugged in.


The thing is I don't even know how this even happened, since that SATA SSD was never used as a boot SSD, and I did a clean install of Windows on my NVMe a while back, but as far as I can tell Windows cut the boot sector on the SSD when I installed it and dumped itself on the NVMe.


Any help would be appreciated.

:)

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that

 

/boot Partition?

[Solved] /boot Partition?

Ok, I like playing around with multiple operating systems so I tend to have a few installed at a time. My issue is related to the bootloader. Every new Linux OS I install installs its own version of Grub. That's fine until you delete that partition.... *Bang Head :banghead:

I was thinking about creating a small (ie ~50MB) partition that /boot will reside on. This way I can have one copy of Grub that would boot my several OS(s) depending on what they are. I think this is a good idea so I can delete one OS's partition and still be able to boot the other OS(s).

Unfortunately, I am not an expert with bootloaders and I'm not really sure how /boot has to do with booting. Can someone tell me how feasible my idea is? I'm looking for a way to have multiple OS(s) but only one bootloader so when I delete one OS, the bootloader will still be intact.

Any ideas/suggestions/advice is appreciated! *Smile

 

/boot Partition?

If you have a newer CPU, I would suggest using some Virtualization software.

Virtual machine software that's free like Virtual Box or a "to buy" one like Vmware...

You can install, mess with and even straight up destroy OS's in a nice, safe little sandbox, and it doesn't hamper a thing *Wink