Windows 10: Hard drive in a caddy causing boot problems

Hi.

I recently installed a fresh Windows 10 Home on my laptop. I was having some problems and so I made a post on this forum. That post can be seen following this link: Factory reset laptop that has had an upgrade to SSD by cloning old HD
That has been solved in a weird way. Basically I had to remove my secondary HD which I had in a caddy connecting where my CD drive used to be.

Now I am having a problem with the secondary hard drive. If I leave it out then I can boot the computer and everything works fine. When I insert the caddy (by shutting down the computer first, of course) and then boot the computer, it gets stuck on a loading screen with the small Windows logo and swirling loading dots on a black background. It stays like that until the computer eventually decides to sleep. Something like 30 minutes.

In the bios both of the hard drives are registered and I can see them in the boot options.

I have also tried to connect the hard drive which is in the caddy to the computer using an external enclosure and then it shows one of the partition as being something like 30GB (should be around 300GB) and the other partition shows up but is unreachable.

I am clueless as to why this is happening.

:)

 

Driver Power State Failure

Hello Preeti Patel,

Thank you for your help and time, I tried your ideas but it did not solve the problem, but I did find out that the problem in my notebook was the hard drive caddy that I used for my second HDD. Thus, it was fixed by switching the small plastic pin near the
place where you connect the Hard Drive to the caddy.

Regards.

 

D:\windows\system32\logfiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt windows 10

Sorry John, none of this worked for me.

I think the fundamental problem is a Windows 10 update that has caused the boot device to be inaccessible. Following the fix under the thread 'inaccessible boot device' and removing the bad Windows fix did solve the problem, but then the bad Windows update
was re-applied and I had the same problem again.

I've now resorted to a full system reset. I removed the hard drive and put it in a caddy to recover all my data, then installed a new hard drive and reinstalled Windows using the manufacturer's recovery tools. This has put me back to Windows 7 Pro and I've
decided to stick with that for the time being.

 

Which disk is set as first boot device in the BIOS ?

 

Also, check through disk management to see if more than one partition is Active, meaning: does each drive have an Active partition? If so, one must be marked nonActive.

 

Sounds like something has corrupted the second hard drive. Using the external enclosure you might want to try data recovery software if you want to try to save the data on the hard drive. Otherwise you a program like MiniTool Partition Wizard to rebuild the MBR and, if needed, delete the existing partitions and create new ones.

MiniTool has both data recovery and partitioning software:
MiniTool Solutions | Best Partition Manager & Data Recovery [Software]

 

Seems like using the Diskpart "clean" option on that HD and then formatting it as a simple NTFS volume might work.

 

The SSD is set as the first boot device. I also tried to override the boot order inside the BIOS using the SSD. Meaning it boots straight from BIOS using the device you selected. To no avail.

Disk management refuses to list the disk.

MiniTool actually lists everything correctly. Great! I can see all the partitions and I can browse the file and folder structure but I can not copy anything.

I forgot to mention that it is not critical that I get the files from this disk but I would like to try.

So how do I use this MiniTool to grab the files I want before formatting the whole disk? I can not see how it is done.

In file explorer I can see E but not F. My data that I would like to grab is on F.

BTW. When I keep this disk plugged in using my external enclosure the computer starts to freeze when file system operations are done. I just tried to copy some files to desktop, then create a folder on the desktop, then create a folder in C:\. Nothing happened. I unplugged the hard drive and BOOM all the operations I issued before completed in an instance.

Here are some pictures:

 

I would try MiniTool's recovery program instead of Partition Wizard.
MiniToll Free Data Recovery Software | Power Data Recovery Free

 

I had this problem due to having an active partition on the external drive. I suggest you use MiniTool Partition Wizard to check the partitions on your external drive and change any active partitions on that drive to inactive. You should only have one active partition on your system drive for a single boot PC.

 

Sorry for the long absence. Had other matters to take care of.

Anyways, I tried to set the harddrive as inactive but that did not work. EDIT: Well, I managed to set it to inactive, but, It still just hangs when I try to boot up from the SSD.
I had the hard drive inside the computer when I installed fresh Windows 10 onto the SSD. Might that have done something to the hard drive?

 

Yes, some parts of system might have been installed on that drive too but that should have opposite effect, wouldn't be able to start without it.
Are we looking at Drive 2 from EAsus picture ? If it is, looks like that that drive has all the partitions to run OS and which should be on drive 1 (BOOT drive).

 

Not sure what you mean by EAsus picture. I will just list them
Pic 1: The C drive is the SSD as one partition. E and F is the hard drive. 750GB split into two partitions. E with 300GB and the rest on F.

Pic 2: Disk 1 is the SSD and Disk 2 is the hard drive. On that picture where you see on Disk 2 "*.System", I changed that one to say "None" instead of "Active" by clicking on the option to make it inactive.

The other pictures are self explanatory I think.

 

Yes, looks like some parts of systems are spread over both SSD and HDD drives and BIOS is getting confuse which to boot from.
There's another problem, your BIOS is set to run in UEFI mode and I don't see any UEFI partitions in either disk.

 

Sorry for this idiotness on my behalf. I must correct an incorrect statement here. I did NOT have the hard drive inserted into the laptop while installing Windows 10 onto the SSD. That was the solution from the previous post to be able to install Windows 10 onto the SSD. I had to REMOVE the hard drive in order to be able to even begin the installation on the SSD. Sorry for the confusion.

BUT, on the hard drive there are remnants of a failed Windows 10 installation. Let me explain: When I got the SSD I cloned the hard drive OS partition to the SSD. Then when I saw that the machine booted with the SSD I put the hard drive back in and tried to factory reset the Windows. That FAILED. So I thought: "**** it, I will just use the SSD with the 'used' Windows on it." Then I bought a caddy and used the hard drive for data ever since. Until now..


P.S. The UEFI boot settings is something I read on another forum that someone suggested when I was trying to install Windows 10 with the hard drive in the computer as well as the SSD. I have changed it to "disabled".