Win10 went bye bye when installing new SATA III HD

[Samuraitech]

Never had this happen before and I was hoping for some ideas as to what might have happened.

 

I was running out of storage space on my PC.  My two primary backup drives were a 2 and 3 TB Seagate HDD's that are getting a bit old.  I also have too many drives and was hoping to install a monster HDD and eliminate some.  I initially was going to buy an SDD but a 4TB Samsung goes for about $500 and up.

 

I got a Seagate Exos X16 14TB HDD.  It's a drive they use in data center racks for storage.

 

I was going to remove my 2TB HDD and install the 14TB in the same slot.  Should take just a few minutes right?  When I turned the PC back on it could not find Win10 on my C drive.  NVMe Samsung SSD.  One of my old drives had a Win7 OS on it and that tried to start but I stopped it.

 

When I went into my BIOS setup my C Drive was showing up and was slotted as the number 1 boot device.

 

I then tried to reformat the C drive thinking I would just reinstall Win10 from my USB Stick.  That was when I was running into this GPT MBR partition stuff where  windows would not install because I had GPT formatted drives.  My PC was and still is  using UEFI and GPT partitions.  I tried to change the partition  to MBR to make Windows happy and also matched in BIOS.  Still could not install Windows.  I ended up resetting my BIOS, putting the BIOS back to UEFI and the drive partition to GPT.  Was then able to install windows.

 

I am back up and running and also have the new drive installed.  Moving backup files to it now.  I did not lose  any mods but I did lose my Mod Organizer installations for Skyrim LE, SE, Fallout NV and Fallout 4.  These were all installed on my boot drive.  Now I get to reinstall Steam, Mod Organizer and all those mods.  I have spent time since the Holidays rebuilding and testing a new Fallout 4 build.  It was stable and working well.  I had just finished tweaking and was playing my permanent character as of two days ago.  I guess I will start backing up my MO2 profiles on a regular basis.  I have vanilla backups of Bethesda games for Steam thanks to Bethesda updating Skyrim SE and FO4.  Just need to move them back from my backup drive.  

 

Any ideas as to why taking out one drive and installing another in the same spot, touching nothing else, would cause this to happen?

[Decèdere]

I know you said the drive was set to first boot priority, but did you try your motherboard's boot menu to directly choose which device to boot from? I have to do this every time I boot, but in my case I just never bother to check/change the boot sequence. If not boot sequence then I have no clue what else could have been the problem. Glad you're up and running again though. One of these days I have to invest in an SSD but they're just so expensive still compared to how much storage you get from an HDD. 14TB is a fucking monster, but I would hate to have it die on me one day.

[Samuraitech]

I did check the motherboard's boot directory.  My NVMe C drive was still listed in the number one spot.  I did not change anything on the PC other than take out one SATA drive and install the new one in the same place.  Only possible thought I had was one of the drives was from another PC and had WIN7 installed on it.  It tried to load when WIN10 was not discovered.  I stopped it as soon as I saw the swirling colored balls that WIN7 does for a startup screen.  When you have multiple OS's installed, usually there is a screen that comes up and asks which one you want.  My C drive with WIN10 was still the first boot drive, but for some reason the system did not recognize it.

 

If you ever get an SSD try for NVMe.  Your MB must have the proper slot.  I think I read somewhere that an NVMe drive is about 6x faster than a regular SSD.

A few years ago I used to scoff at SSD.  When I tried one in my last PC build I saw the light.  I will never go back.  Use the SSD for your boot drive.  HDD is still good  for storage.

They are cheap and have large storage capacity.

[Decèdere]

I've had issues installing Windows before, similar to what you describe. I just ended up unplugging all hard drives except the one I wanted to install Windows. No clue.

 

Yeah I'll need a new mobo to use an SSD. I plan to build a new PC sometime this year, but damn those inflated prices. Is there even such a thing as budget builds anymore? I used to scoff at SSDs too, but I'm starting to find games that have ridiculous long load times, and also everything is just more snappy with an SSD. They may be essential at this point.

[Samuraitech]

I did what you just said about the one drive.  Disconnected all but the one I wanted for Windows.

 

Graphic card prices are insane!  I bought an Nvidia 2060 Super Ultra EVGA a year ago for about $440.   New Egg had a Gigabyte 2060 Plus for $1,488.  That's about 3x what I paid and its not even the 3000 series.

 

Back to my boot drive loss.  MO2 and currently installed mods were on the C drive.  I did not have the profiles backed up, so I lost all that.  I just spent 2 hours trying to find a mod that could look at a save game file and give you the plugin list.  I could then get the mods  in question installed.  Could not find one.  Just found out that MO2 can do this from poking around in the right pane of MO2.  Click on saves tab.  It brings up your saved game directory.  Click on save in question.  Right click and select Enable Mods.  It will come up with a list of the missing mod plugins.  Had to do print screen to get my list.  No way to export from MO2.  I now have my 203 list of plugins.  Time to start loading.

This won't show mods that were in the left pane but most of those are texture or vanilla clothing replacement mods.  I can remember what I usually use.

Fortunately the brain does not run on Windows! 

[landess]

Just a side experience concerning multiple drives:

 

I have an external SSD I use which is drive F

 

'IF' I plug another external drive (HDD) into the USB to access archive files, it WILL bump that external SSD to drive G

 

This caused problems as a couple shortcuts on desktop no longer pointed to the proper .exe and even after unplugging/safe removal of drive was done - the SSD kept the drive G assignment. I was forced to change the drive assignment back to F

 

The HDD drive is usually kept plugged into another system I have as drive E

 

Why this happens is unknown to me - bumping an existing assignment instead of 'falling in line' behind them. The only thing I can think of is USB hubs have assignment priority

 

I could have just made new shortcuts to the 'G' drive, but since I also have FO4 on it (SSD) - that totally messed my Mod Organizer assignments as well. So I just 'turn off' the SSD before plugging in the HDD archive drive. When I remove the HDD and turn the SSD back on - everything is good.

 

This has also kept my FO4 safe from Bethesda patch hell. If I try to run FO4 from the official launcher - it asks to 'install' the game   

 

>>side side note - plugging a memory stick into the USB doesn't affect anything and will become drive G (?)

[Samuraitech]

I love computers, but they can be a royal pain sometimes.

 

When I get done rebuilding FO4, I am going to zip up the entire MO2 directory just like I did with the last build.  

Rapid deployment for worst case scenario.  Just install steam, Unzip your MO2 game save and go!