The installation was successful on a different drive, but it stopped working for your primary storage device.
The installation was successful on a different drive, but it stopped working for your primary storage device.
Hey everyone, I’m facing some issues with my main drive. I can’t boot into it anymore, but all my files and folders still appear normal. I’m not sure what caused this or if there’s a workaround besides reinstalling Windows. I tried using the startup repair on the Windows 10 USB, but that didn’t work. I’ll go through each step I took.
To be clear, I just assembled the PC and bought an M.2 SSD for the main drive. I also kept my old SATA SSD. After installing Windows 10 on the M.2 drive, I could always choose which drive to boot from during startup. However, I didn’t format the SATA SSD until right before I installed another Windows copy there.
Here’s what happened: I booted into the installation USB. My main drive (the M.2 SSD) was labeled drive 2, and my other drive (SATA SSD) was drive 0. I formatted then deleted the partition on drive 0, removing all reserved space so only one unallocated area remained. Then I selected that space and chose “New,” which recreated the smaller partitions. After that, I picked the main partition of drive 0 and pressed Enter to install it. It worked fine at first.
But after restarting, something strange occurred. The boot manager didn’t appear—just a new Windows installation started automatically. In my BIOS, the boot order shows the SATA SSD first, but not mine. Every time I tried to boot from the M.2 SSD, I got a black screen with a flashing underscore that moved between the top left and center of the screen.
I unplugged the SATA SSD so it only booted to the main drive, and the same happened. No changes were made to my main drive during formatting or partitioning. The M.2 SSD boots normally.
Do you know what might have gone wrong? I haven’t touched the main drive since I reformatted, deleted, and recreated partitions on the SATA SSD. That one seems to work perfectly. Any suggestions for fixing this before giving up and reinstalling Windows? Thanks!
I had two Windows 10 drives on one PC, both worked initially. After reinstalling Windows 10 on one drive, I can't boot into the other. It shows an endless black screen with a blinking underscore, but everything on that drive seems fine. The Startup Repair didn’t help.