Windows 10: Windows Built-in apps disappeared after transferring boot drive to a new SSD

I had a Samsung EVO Plus 250GB NVMe SSD for my boot drive, however it got too full, so I bought a 1TB EVO Plus NVMe SSD for the new boot drive. I mirrored the drives and switched to the new drive in the BIOS and then formatted the old SSD to become a storage drive. However, when I formatted the old drive I lost all windows apps like Calculator, Windows store, and other built-in apps when Windows is installed. Where did I go wrong? Should I have kept the old drive unformatted? Was the old drive still being used for Windows UEFI and I caused an error by formatting it into a NTFS drive? I know I

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Random Disappearing/Reappearing SSD on Boot

Config:

ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/Gen 3
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 480GB SSD
Corsair 850W PSU
2x HD 6950 GPU's

My desktop has a 480GB SSD main drive (OS and games), and two secondary HDD's for media storage.

I have had no issues with this SSD, until I tried to add a second video card to my system, and subsequently had to remove it. After a couple re-installs and finally getting the Crossfire to work, I am still in this broken state.

Symptom:

If I put my computer to sleep, restart, power down, it is a complete gamble as to whether or not the system will see the boot drive. What is consistent, is that after a seemingly random interval, it will eventually see the drive and boot straight to windows.

Troubleshooting Steps:

• Reset Bios
• Removed all other options for bootable devices
• Re-installed Windows
• Updated all OS drivers
• Updated firmware for both the MoBo bios and the SSD.
• Replaced all SATA cables
• Moved to another SATA controller port
• Switched power cables
• SSDLife came back saying the drive is healthy

I am literally out of ideas at this point, and the issue is extremely annoying. Sometimes my boot times are 30 seconds (if it sees the drive) sometimes it's 20 minutes (constant reboots until it sees the drive).

Anyone have any other ideas, or have seen this before?

 

Disappearing SSD Syndrome

I have the original Asus Z97 Deluxe board, and I'm also running a Plextor M6e in the M.2 slot. I also had problems with that drive, which was having weird latency issues when it had the original firmware, 1.03 I think. Then I updated the firmware to 1.04 and it had booting problems, which is when I took Windows off and started using the M.2 drive to install games only, booting Windows from a Samsung 850 Pro. Finally Plextor released firmware 1.05, which I suppose fixed the booting problem, but I never trusted it enough after that to use it as my boot drive. Besides, the 850 Pro had better random 4k performance and felt snappier. The M6e 256 is still my game drive, and loads them all very quickly. It's also still on firmware 1.05, although Plextor has released 1.06 and 1.07 since then (I don't trust their firmware updates - leaving it alone while it works fine). So I don't know if the new ones have problems, 1.05 works great though, hasn't disappeared again...yet!

 

Disappearing SSD Syndrome

Thank you for the information. I have built a new system, and am struggling with a disappearing SSD.

Q: Do you have any suggestions for dealing with a disappearing SSD that is an M.2 device. That is, it doesn't have separate SATA data and power connection-- just the motherboard slot. I have a Plextor M6e SSD plugged in to the M.2 slot on an ASUS Z97 Deluxe 3.1 MB.

Thank you for any comments.

Regards,

DG