Won't Boot When Particular Second Hard Drive Added

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  1. Posts : 2,573
    Win7 Ultimate X64
       #11

    What format is your current main boot drive, if you installed full UEFI making your boot disk GPT then adding an MBR disk can cause a fail to boot situation
    You always have the option of putting the drive into an enclosure and connecting via USB
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  2. Posts : 34
    win 7 Pro 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #12

    whs said:
    If there is an active partition on the drive in question, deactivate that.

    https://social.technet.microsoft.com...tprovistasetup
    Thanks for the note.

    I would try that solution, but as mentioned above, I can't even boot into windows once that second drive is installed. and the solution you linked to requires booting into windows.

    Thanks.
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  3. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #13

    Can't you attach it once the OS is booted. Else you will have to do it with Gparted from a live Linux system.
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  4. Posts : 34
    win 7 Pro 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #14

    Pauly said:
    What format is your current main boot drive, if you installed full UEFI making your boot disk GPT then adding an MBR disk can cause a fail to boot situation
    You always have the option of putting the drive into an enclosure and connecting via USB
    Thank you for the reply:

    What format is your current main boot drive,
    Not 100% sure this is what you want to know, but this is what I could find:

    Two volumes:

    Disk 0
    Basic
    Online
    100MB Healthy (EFI System Partition)

    Me (C: )
    465.54GB NTFS
    Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition).

    Since I don't think I have a USB case that will take a SATA drive (my USB case is old and I think it is an IDE drive in there currently, do you think I could just delete the MBR from the second drive???

    Plan B: I know that I could delete the partitions of the second drive when I boot up using a linux CD. Just is that going to erase all the DATA as well?

    Thanks in advance!
    Last edited by anotherusername; 18 Feb 2016 at 14:29. Reason: Smiley face
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  5. Posts : 34
    win 7 Pro 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #15

    whs said:
    Can't you attach it once the OS is booted. Else you will have to do it with Gparted from a live Linux system.
    I have tried to hot plug in the sata cable, and that did not seem to work.

    So I started with the second drive in the bay with the power cable plugged in but the sata cable unplugged, then after it booted up, hot plugged the sata cable, but it was not recognized. I went to device manager and refreshed, and it didn't see the drive. I went to the utility for format drive just to see if it was visible, and it wasn't visible there, either.

    Else you will have to do it with Gparted from a live Linux system.
    I have that drive in a separate box right now and I am booted up with a live Linux disk and I have gparted open.

    could you please kindly tell me WHAT I should do though?

    would simply changing the flag (the main ext4 partition has a boot flag) solve the problem?

    Or would I need to actually delete the partitions?

    And would I need to create an NTFS partition afterwards?

    And would this delete the files that were on the drive?

    Thanks in advance.
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  6. Posts : 34
    win 7 Pro 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #16

    Well... I got it to boot up...

    I used a live Linux disk to delete the MBR and the partitions, using this command:

    Code:
    # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1
    Note that this deletes BOTH the MBR AND the partition table.

    I got it from here:

    Linux Delete / Remove MBR

    I then booted up the computer with this disk in the slave drive and windows booted up fine off the primary drive.

    I tried to run recuva to get the files, but it said that it couldn't read the drive because it didn't know the file format.

    So, I went to the Disk Management utility and initialized the disk.

    A simple inialization didn't fix it, so I created a simple volume on the disk, making sure that quick format was checked.

    Then I restarted recuva...

    When I did a simple scan, it said there were no files

    But it gave me the option to do a deep scan, which I elected to do.

    The deep scan is estimated to take about 50 minutes. It is showing SOME promise: it is 70% done and it says that it has found nearly 600,000 files!!!

    I have to wait another 20 minutes or so, then I hopefully will know whether those files can actually be recovered or not.

    I hope this helps anyone else in my predicament.
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  7. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #17

    I think you are only going to get junk. Those 600.000 files are nothing you can use.
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  8. Posts : 34
    win 7 Pro 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #18

    whs said:
    I think you are only going to get junk. Those 600.000 files are nothing you can use.
    Well, not entirely...

    I am using recuva, and it found a ridiculous number of image files (that is what I am concentrating on right now).

    Recuva was able to "partially recover" 275,000 jpg, gif, png files.

    A good number of them ARE junk. They tend to have file names like:

    $I0AR6UX_3.JPG

    But taking a look through, it does seem like there will be a lot of fully recovered image files.

    the problem I see is going to be sorting through all of them.

    Is there a utility that I could use to quickly find all the corrupt jpg files in a folder?
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  9. Posts : 34
    win 7 Pro 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #19

    Just to update:

    I had previously used photorec (part of testdisk utility) and it recovered about 26,000 photo files.

    The files names were not recovered, so the majority of files have names like:

    f01345789.jpg
    [31567829.gif
    t99532814.jpg

    Recuva, on the other hand, found ten-times as many photo files, but the majority of them are corrupted.

    So photorec seemed to recover only those files that weren't corrupted, while recuva recovered tons of files that are corrupted beyond repair.

    this seems to be the case for various pdf and different doc files as well.

    Now I am trying purinan file recovery and will see what it can do.
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  10. Posts : 34
    win 7 Pro 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #20

    Well, I got a lot of junk, and a lot of good files, too.

    Sorting through it all is going to be a nightmare.

    I found that disk drill is quite user friendly, especially when compared to recuva.

    With disk drill, you can "lock" the disk you are working on, and save your project for later. So if you are interrupted after doing a scan but before recovering all the files, you can resume where you left off later.

    It seemed like for recuva, you had to do the whole scan over again.

    Recuva found the MOST files, but overwhelmingly they were junk or files that were on repair.

    So if this were to happen again, I think I would use photorec first to recover pretty much everything, and then use disk drill, which might not recover as much as photorec, but does tend to organize things better.

    Hope this helps.
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