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BSOD occurs at boot up unless two hard drives are connected
I'm not sure if this should be in the BSOD, hardware, or software section as it involves them all really. Please move if appropriate.
OS: Windows 7 64 bit retail
Hardware approx two years old. OS install between 1.5 and 2 years ago (upgrade from XP). Repair install performed two days ago.
Requested permon report etc attached.
I intended to have my computer set up so that:
-Hard Drive 1 (small SSD)
*Windows 7 hidden partition
*C Drive with usual Windows files plus some programs
-Hard Drive 2
*Partition containing other programs especially large ones (games)
Recently I disconnected Hard Drive 2 which SHOULD have only non-Windows files on it. With this Hard Drive disconnected, Windows BSOD's during boot (just after the lights recombine to form the Windows logo). This problem is solved by reconnecting Hard Drive 2.
BSOD code:
0x000000F4 (0x0000000000000003, 0xFFFFFA800FB3B30, 0xFFFFFA8005FB3E10, 0xFFFFF8000337A300).
Is there a way that I can fix this so that I could use Windows with only Hard Drive 1 connected?
More details following, but the above describes the effects of whatever the problem is.
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Things I have tried:
- Turn on computer with only Hard Drive 1 connected, wait for BSOD and restart, then run system repair (tried multiple times as recommended in many places online)
- Perform repair installation. I had to connect both Hard Drives in order to boot into Windows.
- Turn on computer with only Hard Drive 1 connected, wait for BSOD and restart, then use command prompt and follow instructions in options two and three in the URL below. Honestly, I don't really know what it was doing. My understanding is that it was using the bootrec and bcdedit commands to rebuild whatever Windows needs to boot up. Option two had no effect, i.e. computer worked with both drives attached, but not with only Drive 1. Option three made it worse - a BSOD occurred even earlier during boot up and I got a message about something in Windows/system32 being corrupt or missing, and it was impossible to get Windows running even with Drive 2 connected. Running the repair disk auto repair feature returned things to the usual problem.
Recovering the Windows Bootloader from the DVD - EasyBCD - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki
As I said, I don't understand what the above process was doing exactly but it seems to me that because it didn't repair the problem, the cause is something other than this BCD thing?
I'm not sure if this could be part of the problem but my partitioning isn't quite what I said above. Hard Drive 2 has two further partitions, the last one in particular could be an issue:
-Hard Drive 2
*Partition containing other programs especially large ones (games)
*Partition with a few large videos on (from when I had a capture card)
*Hidden Partition. This actually contains a clone (using Acronis). I had completely forgotten about this clone, it was a backup. As far as I remember, it's a clone of the only hard drive (so it had the OS on it) that I had in this computer before I got a SSD. So I guess that this is actually a second Windows installation with the same product key etc. I would delete it but I don't want to stop the computer working even with Hard Drive 2 connected.
I asked about this elsewhere and was told to wipe Hard Drive 2. I do not want to do this because (1) I'm trying to fix this problem without losing installed programs and files/data, and (2) I can still boot into Windows by connecting Hard Drive 2 - if I wipe it then the computer won't be operational at all.
If this problem is due to some Windows files or whatever missing from Hard Drive 1, then I'm looking for a way to just put them there and make sure Windows knows where to look for them. After the computer is running fine from just that Hard Drive I could move on to thinking about deleting things from Hard Drive 2 (mainly that clone...).
Sorry for the long post but I'm guessing that this may be a complicated problem so I tried to provide as much information as possible, please ask if I missed anything relevant. Any help would be greatly appreciated!