PC won’t boot with second hard drive installed

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I have just installed a Asus M5A97 R2.0 motherboard and installed Windows onto a 1TB hard drive. Everything boots and runs as it should but when I connect a second hard drive (I have tried a couple) the machine will not boot stating that it is trying read in Windows files then tells me to reboot with the correct media. I have checked in the BIOS and the boot order is correct as to it states the 1TB hard drive as first.
As soon as I unplug the second hard drive the machine boots normally.
One thing I noticed, if its relevant, is that in the BIOS with two hard drives connected, the second is listed as Disk 0 and the Windows hard drive as Disk 1.
Any advice/help will be apreciated.

Alan

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Go to Disk Management. Has the new drive got a drive letter?

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Go to Disk Management. Has the new drive got a drive letter?

Thanks for replying. Yes it is shown as Disk0 and the partitions each have a drive letter.

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It should be disk 1. Swap over the connectors on the motherboard. The main drive should be on connector 1 and the additional drive on connector 2, or just swap the connectors on the drives if those on the motherboard are correct.

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It should be disk 1. Swap over the connectors on the motherboard. The main drive should be on connector 1 and the additional drive on connector 2, or just swap the connectors on the drives if those on the motherboard are correct.

It is connected to No 1 but reads as Disk 0.

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Solved the problem!
Threw it in the bin and bought a GigaByte instead.

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Vat ist Gigabyte – mobo?

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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Vat ist Gigabyte – mobo?

Sorry, I dont know what Vat ist means

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AlanWade, I was poking fun at my German heritage!
What is the Gigabyte item – your motherboard? Or, video card?
What did you toss into the bin?
I’m learning from you on how to solve a related problem, if such happens to me again.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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Ahhh OK, it is a new mobo. I threw the Asus M5A97 R2.0 mobo which was a shame as it was brand new but didnt want to hang around to see what the supplier was going to do. Basically I had asked for help here, at Asus and from the supplier but didnt get the problem solved so just ordered a GigaByte motherboard which works without fault.

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I just discovered something interesting. I have a PC with an ASUS Z87 mobo with EUFI and W8.1 installed. If you hold down F8, switch on the PC then release and press F8 a few times, you are taken to a screen which allows you to choose which available drive to boot from and it will boot from the drive chosen regardless of the boot order that’s actually been set. I found it very useful when the OS on the C drive was corrupted. I booted from D (which became C), adjusted the drive letters in Disk Management, cloned C to the now D and rebooted as normal. Pity its too late for Alan to try it.:mellow:

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Tried that Calimanco it wasnt having it. Even though I chose the correct drive to boot from it seemed to want to try to boot from the extra hard drive.

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Hello Alan,

I’m a little late into this discussion, but *I* had a similar problem to your a year or so back. I discovered MY problem was due to the extra drive being originally formatted as a boot disk rather than just as a data disk. To resolve that, I used a free utility called Parted Magic (part of the Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com or available individually at http://www.partedmagic.com) With Parted Magic I was able to toggle the “boot” flag off, and then the system would boot correctly. Your mileage may vary, but it might be worth a shot in the future if you run across that situation again.

Cheers!

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Would setting the correct boot drive in the BIOS not have worked?

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The probable root cause here is that the BIOS used by the first motherboard checks each “disk” for boot information on boot up prior to going to the indicated disk and completing the boot up process. If you have a disk marked as bootable and the information is missing or bad, it hangs the boot up process. Now-a-days you rarely get a disk that is setup as bootable and has a bad boot record.

Simply removing the “boot record” or fixing the boot record on that disk should resolve that issue. I recommend removing the boot record from the second disk now so you won’t see misleading error messages later. (Unless you run an OS on the second disk as well.)

The last time I saw this was with an SD card that was marked bootable with a bad boot record. Ejected the SD card and the system booted. A reformat of the SD later it no longer was an issue.

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Disk numbers are NOT determined by the hardware connections but by Microsoft INABILITY to use SATA connections.

Microsoft say the the drives are numbered in “order of enumeration”.

In practice my SSD should be Disk 0 due to its SATA channel number,
BUT it is the LAST ONE to be enumerated as Disk 2 on a First Time Power Up in the morning,
but on any subsequent RESTART it gets enumerated faster (it does NOT have to “spin-up” like the HDD)
and is randomly either Disk1 or Disk 0

Oh for the good old days of IDE connections when hardware connections determined Disk numbers.

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I installed EasyBCD. I told it to make my Windows 7 Pro cdrive a bootable drive. That, along with the normal 100mb System Reserved — means I have the normal boot partition, and, I have a “backup” bootable [cdrive]? Some of this easyBCD would have helped OP?

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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I was going to post my own thread but it looks like there are several real good brains on this one.

My Dell Studio 9000 of 4 years crashed and rather than replace motherboard, I received a new Dell T5610 with a solid state drive and a secondary 3 TB secondary drive.

All well and good but my idea was to remove the SS drive, boot up with the old drive, install drivers, get stable, then migrate boot drive to the ss drive. All drives are SATA, the small connectors.

My old boot drive is a Seagate 1TB Barracuda.

So I installed the old boot drive. Now BIOS is set for either UEFI or Legacy. If I choose UEFI, the default, the old hard drive tries to boot and can’t. There are no drivers on the drive and the connectors to the drive are connected to the SS drive at the end, old drive in middle.

If I switch to Legacy, the SS drive will not boot, neither will old drive. SS boots only when it is UEFI and only drive. BIOS/UEFI does see both drives.

Now the old boot drive seems viable to me. I connect it via a USB hub and I can see all data. If I am not mistaken, Win 7 will not boot from an external hard drive.

Will I be forced to reinstall all my apps via disks onto the new hard drive?

Thank you!!!

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My best educated guess is: yes, you will have to reinstall programs onto the default cdrive.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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You cant boot from the old hard drive because the OS on it doesn’t have the drivers to allow it to work with the new MOBO and you cant install the drivers until it boots. Catch 22. Before anyone says anything, I know there are workarounds for the skilled user, but a clean reinstall is the better option in my opinion as it avoids perpetuating any existing problems.
Whilst its possible to install programs on a second partition or hard drive, most still need to write files to the Registry to be able to work. The Registry is, of course, part of the OS and is therefore located on the primary partition or hard drive. If you try to run a previously installed registry dependant program from an external hard drive it wont work because it cant find the Registry entries where it expects them to be. Such programs need to be reinstalled. Download the latest versions if you can, rather than relying on out of date CD/DVDs. I would, however, caution against installing programs, especially processor intensive ones on an external hard drive unless its USB3 or better as USB2 is too slow for the speed of data transfer required to give a satisfactory result.

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