Windows lacks a bootable drive?
Windows lacks a bootable drive?
Hello, today was quite unusual for me. A friend lent me a hard drive that wasn’t being used. I checked my PC yesterday and plugged it in to test, and it functioned properly. After that, I cleaned the system while installing it and then tried to boot. Everything worked fine until I shut down and reassembled the case. Then, when I turned it back on, my M.2 SSD appeared but couldn’t boot Windows. The BIOS no longer showed the UEFI partition, and the drive displayed only its model number without showing the full capacity. Even when I swapped it to the bottom slot, nothing happened. I became concerned it might be damaged, but it seems okay. When I used a bootable Windows USB, the drive appeared with its usual size and files were present. My specs are listed, but I’m unsure if I can recover the partition or need to reinstall Windows.
It's definitely achievable, I've faced similar issues before—like when dual-booting or adjusting the Windows installer to place the boot partition on a secondary HDD instead of the main drive. I followed a guide that matched what I needed, using commands executed through Windows install USB with DiskPart.
It prevents me from forming a partition because it claims insufficient space, yet the Windows Install Screen shows 10GB free. Other drives appear to have limited free space in DiskPart, except one small partition. The error reads: "No usable free extent could be found...". It might mean the disk is set to MVR format with restrictions on partitions.
You likely need to reduce the size of that drive so the EFI partition fits. I don’t remember the precise steps, but usually you pick the partition and run “shrink desired=512.” Once done, the EFI partition should be ready.
Since the last update, several changes occurred. I attempted to use GParted but was unsure about its features, so I opted to install Windows on the new drive I received. Then I used Disk Management to create partitions, but it reported zero MB of available shrink space. I verified that my files were intact, including music and videos, so I considered transferring everything to the new drive and reinstalling Windows on the main SSD as a backup, though I preferred not to do that. TL;DR: Windows indicates it can't shrink the partition.