Windows 10: Windows 10 Wont boot - GPT issue? Maybe update related?

Hi,

Not sure if this is the right forum or not.. If not, please point me in the right direction and accept my apology!

Sorry if this is long, but I want to give adequate back story.. My issue is that I had a Win10 Enterprise insider preview install that's been working well for months. I recently decided I wanted the ability to pop-in a second hard drive, and/or swap out hard drives to boot other OS's without messing up my Win10, so I installed two hot-swap hard drive caddies.

With my Win10 in the top caddy, and the second caddy empty, I've been using it this way for weeks, with no problem. I had a friend who asked for help with their PC, so before I did anything, I wanted to get a good image backup of it, and couldn't get their PC to boot off of a CD, so I popped their hard drive into my second caddy and booted on a Linux "Clonezilla" live CD, and proceeded to make a backup of the hard drive to a network share. This worked fine, but upon removing the second disk, my machine kept telling me to insert a boot disk and press any key to retry boot. (like you'd get in the old days if you had no active partition).

Just for kicks, I went into my BIOS and told it to "override boot" to the disk in UEFI mode (which was the default anyway) and it booted.. So, I know that the disk at this point is good, and suspect that there's just something odd with how the BIOS boot priorities are set. I used the computer for a week or so, and although I could never find a BIOS boot setting that would make it boot properly by default, it worked just fine if I manually chose the boot disk.

A few days ago, I got a windows update of some kind, and now the system wont boot at all.. I'm trying to insert a picture if I can, but upon boot, it goes immediately to a screen that says performing automatic fix (sorry can't remember exact words) and then goes to a BSOD that says:

Recovery
Your PC/Device needs to be repaired
An Unexpected error has occurred
Error code 0xc000000e
You'll need to use the recovery tools...
<etc, with no more detail>

I can't get beyond this.. I've gone so far as to try to do a "reinstall, saving files and programs" and it tells me the drive that windows is on is locked.

To get working today, I just grabbed a 1tb drive off the shelf, and did a completely fresh install. Once that install was done and patched, I put the original 4tb drive into the second caddy, and it came up as a foreign disk. I imported the foreign disk, and I can see everything on the old disk.. All the partitions are there and fine..

SO.. I have backed up my files, and I could just do a fresh install, and start over, but I'd really like to see if I can fix this, if only for a learning experience.. I don't know much about GPT, and this might be a good test case for me to work through..

Anyone have any idea what might have happened? Did I do anything in my disk swapping? Is it likely that the windows update killed me?

Now that I have a working 1tb drive, what is the best way to put the other Windows install from the second drive as a secondary boot option? If that works, then is there a way to diagnose the disk to boot directly?

I Do have a windows install disk that I was using as a recovery disk to run some tests, and for example was able to see the partitions via diskpart.exe but didn't really know where else to go..

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Steve

:)

 

How to restore or convert an mbr system image to gpt format

Hi,

Are you talking about TWO instances of Win 10 running, or are you wanting to overwrite the Win 10 GPT partition with the MBR Image ?...

Loading the MBR image onto the GPT partition might work without any issues, but there may be some... The GPT installation probably uses a EFI partition and "Windows Boot Manager" to boot... the MBR installation does not...

If it does not, a Startup Repair may resolve the problem...

I have had mixed success switching between MBR and GPT installations of Win 10...

Depending on how you created the System Image, it may refuse to load onto a GPT drive... The Windows imaging method is pretty finicky about stuff like that...

 

Unable to Install Windows 10. Need to Convert MBR to GPT

So i tried installing windows 10, but it wont allow me to install it on my hdd. Something about it being mbr and windows 10 can only be installed on gpt. I tried to convert it to gpt using command prompt, but got an error message about it not being able
to so it in the selected disk. Maybe just an too old hdd?

 

So.. a little more information - I was able to use "EasyBCD" from NeoSmart technologies to add a secondary boot entry in, and now I can use my new fresh install to boot the OS on the bad (now secondary) disk, so I know that the OS is fine..

Back in the "old days" this is what would happen if a partition wasn't marked active, or if the MBR was damaged, but with the GPT disk format, I dont know where to look for the equivilent.

Does this help? Can anyone point me to references on basically what the equivilent of the old boot.ini and related boot files are in the new world of GPT?

Thanks!
Steve

 

https://www.tenforums.com/installatio...tallation.html check out this thread, it appears you have the same issue. Your boot manager is damaged and needs to be rebuilt/repaired