Here is a question from someone who just tried something bad and can't turn their computer on anymore.
Here is a question from someone who just tried something bad and can't turn their computer on anymore.
Hi, so I put in a new hard drive and made my Windows copy from my old one. I changed which drive gets started first, then turned on the computer into Windows 11 with no problems. Next, I wanted to use the old drive for storing files, but Windows wouldn't let me format it because it's marked as a system drive that shouldn't be changed. So I looked online and found a trick: run the "clean" command from diskpart. That worked! The drive was now empty, but when I tried to make new partitions in Windows Disk Management, a red dot still appeared on the icon.
I thought maybe restarting would help me reboot into Windows on the clean drive instead of the old one. But after I restarted, my computer didn't start normally; it showed an error message titled "Recovery" with code 0xc00000e and some options that did nothing when I clicked them. After checking my BIOS settings, everything was set correctly to use the new untouched drive.
Then it got worse: even though I tried using a Windows 11 USB stick from Rufus to boot up the computer (and set the USB as the primary device), it still immediately went to that error screen. When I took the old hard drive out of the PC, nothing changed—the error is still there. I'm completely stuck here and would really appreciate any help with this situation.
That's why you should always wipe the old disk before putting up a fresh one. You need to make sure your computer starts using just the new drive and that the old one is unplugged first. Does it start working now with only the new drive running?
Lesson learned there! It won't start in any setup. The thing that bugs me is that it doesn't even show up to open the recovery menu from the USB stick. I haven't tried putting both hard drives away and booting without them, but I guess it will work the same way...
I have two choices for you here: First, try to fix the mistake you made by reinstalling your hard drive image. However, I'm assuming that version doesn't exist because we wouldn't be talking about this right now. Second, do a clean install of the operating system with all your stuff. If you only have one stick connected at this time, your old data might not be lost entirely from the original drives.
Thank you so much for your help! I figured out the fix by taking out every storage drive first, then finally being able to boot into the recovery tool on my USB stick. After that, I turned off the PC again and re-installed the NVMe hard drive. I also made sure the boot priority was set to the USB stick. Then I started Command Prompt from the stick and ran diskpart. There, what I thought would be normal happened: the partitions on the new NVMe didn't have any drive letters assigned yet, so I gave them one each. To fix the boot records, I used the bcdboot command and restarted the PC (without the USB stick connected at that time). It booted smoothly straight into the OS on the new NVMe! Glad it went smooth and my data is all still there here. Hope this helps anyone else with a similar problem. I'll be more careful next time before trying to use diskpart for sure =)
Hi bolorok, I hit the same problem again, and silly me, twice now. On my first try, I didn't find any help after searching online so I just made a complete reinstall. Now on a different computer, I found myself in exactly the same spot (I wasn't sure if cleaning it out was what caused this, but now I am sure). Glad to finally find this post which helped me. Could you please explain more about the part where you assigned drive letters? Also, how did you use the bcdboot command to fix the boot records? What exactly did you do? Thank you very much in advance!