Help With Win7, Boot Drives, Uefi, Bios...

Trying to figure out and learn about boot drives / UEFI / BIOS :

I've got a 4 year old HP 750-055xt desktop with Win7 pro, 64-bit, SP1 (HP's site allowed a custom config with Win7 at the time). It came with a WD 1TB HDD. I bought another identical WD 1TB HDD right away, and every few months I've used Macrium Reflect to clone the current boot drive onto the other one. Then I swap cables and leave the just-cloned-boot-drive unplugged, and start using the clone as my boot drive. It's my backup in case a drive fails. (yes, I also back up really important files onto a usb drive). The only issue I find is that upon first booting the new clone, I'd always get some sort of "Realtek error", or "no bootable drive found" error. I then boot into the bios, and change the boot order...the new drive appears under the UEFI boot devices at the bottom, so I move it to the top. After that everything works fine. Until...

Several months ago I got a 1TB SSD and cloned onto it. Same boot process occured where I had to move the SSD to the top of the boot list. I've been loving the SSD speed, but when I recently tried to clone it, I couldn't because of a bunch of bad sectors. I copied all my files from the past several months onto a usb drive and was going to "update" the older HDD with these files in case the SSD dies anytime soon. I unplugged the SSD, and plugged the HDD into that SATA cable (0). When I tried to boot, I got the usual error BUT...no amount of fiddling with the boot order would get the drive to boot. No boot drive found. Then I put the SSD back on SATA cable 0, and hooked the HDD to SATA 3. And was totally puzzled that the computer then booted off of the HDD on SATA 3!

NOW...after updating my files on the HDD and disconnecting it, the SSD won't boot regardless of what I do with boot order. But if BOTH the HDD & SSD are connected, it will boot to the HDD, regardless of my boot order settings (once in Windows, the SSD is accessible as drive F). I'm stumped.

Can anyone explain what the heck is going on and help demystify this whole boot process? I have only the most vague understanding of UEFI, and from what little I see online, it's really a Win8 & Win10 thing. I don't want to mess around with BIOS too much since I have no experience with it. But if I disable UEFI and leave Legacy Boot devices enabled, will it solve this type of issue? What I want is to be able to swap drives after cloning, and just have the computer boot from whatever drive is the currently connected one. Why is it so problematic?

 

Take a look at the partitions and see which drives are bootable.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/easeus_partition_master_home_edition.html

 

They are all bootable... They are complete clones.

 

Having Windows 7, I would use legacy mode, -unless the hard drive is GPT mode.
If your system was MBR, then legacy mode .

 

Why clone the entire drive and go through the laborious process you have described above.

Just use an imaging program instead and have the 2nd hard drive as a back up.

If you want to use the belt 'n' braces approach as I do then have a boot drive, SSD, with your o/s and programs and 2 additional internal HDDs (not in raid mode) and have your data and images (of your boot drive) on those.

Plus you can get an external 2 bay raid enclosure, in Raid 1, and copy all the data from your internal HDDs.

backlogic is absolutely correct in his statement

Good Luck

 

I really don't find the cloning process laborious. Open the case and connect cables to a 2nd drive. Boot up and run macrium reflect. Takes about 2 hours. Shut down, open case, unplug just-cloned drive. Boot to new clone. My way, if the current drive fails, all I have to do is connect the other drive and I'm back in business right away, without having to restore a drive image. And doing it that way, I'd still have to have something to boot off of to restore the image, and have a drive to restore the image to.

But yeah, this crazy uefi boot issue has been driving me nuts. I actually messed with it yesterday and got it to boot off the ssd again. How? I connected the ssd and hdd at the same time. It booted off the hdd and the ssd showed as drive f in windows. I shut down and moved the ssd to the sata cable the hdd was on, and disconnected the hdd. Tried to boot. No go, no boot media found. Left the ssd connected as is, connected the hdd to the other sata cable. Then the computer booted....off the ssd. Shut down. Disconnected hdd. Now the computer boots fine with just the ssd connected. Totally wacky, it. Makes no sense to me.

Oh, and yes, the drives are gpt. Not by choice, that's just the way it came originally.

 

Just a thought - When you move the ssd to first bootable, do you remember to save (usually F10 )?

 

Tried fixing the boot on the ssd?

 

I agree with you that I would need a spare HDD my way but I have a spare (as well as spare ram, VGA and anything else I would require).

Each time I image my primary / boot partition it takes no more than 20 mins and if I needed to replace that drive it would take me 10 mins to physically replace the drive and 20 or so mins to re-image back again.....which is much more efficient time wise but of course I understand that everyone does what they feel most comfortable with...

However, focusing on your issue the first thing that I would check on you SSD is whether the boot flag is on......If your pc is booting with the HDD connected only (or with the SSD also connected at the same time) but not with the SSD only (with correct boot order in bios), then that is the first thing to double check

Good luck

 

>the first thing that I would check on you SSD is whether the boot flag is on.....

How do I check a drives boot flag?

 

The link for Partition Master Home which was posted earlier will show you all of the partitions on a given drive and which ones are set to Active (boot flag).
At least the first time you use Macrium to do the "cloning", you need to do the entire device so you get all of the partitions; but, I have always moved the SATA cables so the boot drive is always on the same one.

 

Have never used Macrium Reflect so cannot help. The boot partition can have an A next to it or Active or Boot

Here is a screenshot of GParted to illustrate

https://gparted.org/screens/gparted-main-window.png