Windows installation fails due to a failing backup or secondary hard drive.
Windows installation fails due to a failing backup or secondary hard drive.
Hi everyone - I experienced quite an unusual week, and the problem I faced seems puzzling. Although I think it’s now fixed, I’m curious about the reason behind it. My setup includes Windows 10 on an NVMe drive, a secondary NVMe via PCIe, and a SATA 2TB hard disk for general use. The Windows installation on the NVMe worked well, but recently I’ve seen Explorer crashing when trying to access the SATA drive. Eventually, the SATA created a separate "System Reserved" partition. After removing it, Windows would fail to boot on the next restart ("Reboot select proper boot device"). This was confusing because the SATA and NVMe didn’t seem connected. I attempted various methods to boot into Windows, but it consistently failed. I tried using Start-Up Repair, which didn’t help. When I reinstalled Windows, everything from the old installation appeared intact. The SATA issues persisted, so I replaced the failing drive with a new NVMe/PCIe unit. After disconnecting the old SATA drive, the problem reappeared, forcing another fresh install within 48 hours. Now that the SATA drive is gone, I’m hoping it resolved the boot issue. Unless... the NVMe itself is problematic? It’s still unclear why this had such a big effect on my Windows boot process.
during setup, the installer chose to place its boot partition on the spinning hard drive, since the Windows installer remains quite problematic. that’s why many users recommend keeping only the main drive free of other partitions when installing Windows.
This usually occurs when an HDD was previously used as a Windows boot disk and wasn’t properly formatted to erase all remnants. It’s still not advisable, because Windows should be logical and recognize the drive you’re installing OS on as the intended location for system files. When has Microsoft ever acted this way?
It seems unlikely I've ever used two clean drives before. I encountered issues when switching from an HDD to an SSD as the system preferred the existing one. I think there might be some unusual logic—like losing the recovery partition if the OS drive fails—making it safer to keep it elsewhere. But if the main drive is corrupted, how would you even start from a recovery partition? It’s probably easier to recover from a USB stick.