Windows 10: Will not boot except through recovery - every time

OK, closer...
(You guys rock, by the way)

I was able to get Macrium Reflect to create a recovery CD, boot from it, and run its boot repair. I think things are almost working right. Here's where we're at:

• The laptop boots without having to go into recovery first. Good.
• When it boots, I enter my password on the Win10 splash screen and it returns me back to the splash screen. The second time I enter my password, it works. This is 100% consistent, and behaves this way every time. Weird, and may be indicative of some other problem still lurking.
• When I hit F12 during the boot process and look at my boot options, I have the following choices:

• Windows Boot Manager
• Onboard NIC (IPV4)
• Onboard NIC (IPV6)
• HDD1 - Windows Boot Manager (HGST STS721010A9E630) [this is the 1 TB HDD]

So, #1 is great, #2 is annoying and may be a symptom of another problem, and #3 doesn't explicitly tell me that it's using the SDD to boot. Where is the boot record (on which drive)? My fear is that if I go back and combine the partitions on the HDD as NavyLCDR suggested, I'll bork up something, because the computer is somehow still using something from the HDD and not exclusively looking at the SDD.

Any thoughts on that?

Thanks again,
Scott

 

You can always go into UEFI settings and in the boot priorities section disable every boot device except for "Windows Boot Manager". Then you will know it is booting from the SSD and not just skipping down the list to the HDD.

 

I don't think I can do that - or at least I don't know how. I've been in the boot options page and the bios page and can't find anything that lets me set devices as enabled or disabled. With it set to UEFI, it seems to be a matter of "computer knows more than you, so you don't get to make changes". Sigh.

Unless you know where I can find such settings, I may have to resort to taking the laptop apart and physically disconnecting the HDD to confirm booting exclusively from the SSD. I'd rather not do that though, since it's such a pain in the neck...

Given that this is where we are, what do you recommend? Should I go through the hassle to confirm the SSD is being booted uniquely?

Also, assuming we end in a stable state, how would you recommend I set up partitions, restore points, and such to ensure an easy recovery should this happen again?

Thanks again, folks!

Scott

 

I would make a bootable USB flash drive of Kyhi's recovery tools, make sure you can boot into it. Then fix the HDD. With Kyhi's recovery tools you can recreate the EFI System partition on the SSD if it is, in fact, messed up and booting from the HDD.

 

I'll work on that over the weekend. I plan to uninstall the HDD to confirm the SSD is working alone, then I'll use Kyhi's recovery tools to combine the HDD to a single partition.

I consider this clean-up, and the primary problem appears to be solved. I'll mark this one as resolved, and post again if I have follow up questions.

Thanks again for all your help!!

Scott

 

Boot my rescue media.
launch Aomie Partition Assistant
Find the disk that has the 919GB partition
Right Click on the other 4 partitions on that disk and select Delete
then select Apply (upper left corner button)
after Apply > right click 919GB partition select resize
Drag out arrows in both directions to fill partition then again click apply

 

I just noticed that if you install MiniTool Partition Wizard Free it will tell you which drive the computer was booted from:

 

Thanks Kyhi. I'll do that once I'm convinced I'm not inadvertently killing anything useful.

NavyLCDR, thanks for the tip. Please take a look at this screen shot. If I interpret this correctly, Disk 2 (the SSD) is the boot drive HOWEVER...

Although Disk 2 has partitions labeled "recovery partition", so does Disk 1. In fact, I recently changed my allocated space for system restore points to 11GB, and that seems to have changed on BOTH disks. So, how do I know which one is really getting the data when I set a restore point? (And which one actually holds the recovery data?)




Thanks,
Scott