Question It works but what the heck is going on?

[Shredded_Wheat64]

Long story short...bought an NVME and decided to reinstall Win11 on it. So during install I formatted old SSD with previous Win 11 (didn't want any hickups)...once OS was installed under my computer that SSD no longer shows up in the OS (but does show up under "disk management") and though the OS is installed on NVME. If I disconnect the SSD the computer won't boot and goes straight to bios. Prior to starting up the computer gives me a choice of 2 different volumes of Windows 11 to start from? Guess I should have deleted the reserved partitions? Just trying to understand what happened. Been building computers since the AMD K5 - 166mhz. Thanks!

 

[Brainonska511]

It sounds like your boot partition ended up on the wrong drive. Windows is known to do this occasionally.

One way to fix it: disconnect the old drive, reinstall Windows on the NVME, then reconnect the old drive (and wipe all the partitions on the old drive, including system reserved stuff, and format it).

 

[manly]

Your OS bootloaders sit on a partition called the ESP, which was and still is on your old SSD. @Brainonska511 gave a procedure on how you can fix this. You probably want to set the NVMe as the first boot option in UEFI.

If you were allergic to reinstalling Win11, you could also manually fix this in-place. The following procedure appears reasonable to me (never tried it):

Move EFI partition to another drive – Windows 10

Seems to me that this my little trip to the Windows land might actually trigger me to learn a thing or two about that OS. Naturally, I’m also planning to jot those things down here. So while installing Windows to spare NVMe drive it decided to place its bootloader to existing EFI partition where...

www.tomica.net

 

[lakedude]

This sort of thing came up on another thread. Someone was complaining that most motherboards lack the ability to switch individual HD/SSD ports on/off in the BIOS. This brought up the question why anyone would want to do such a thing and the answer was basically to prevent Windows from installing parts of itself to unwanted places, which it is prone to doing.

The consensus was to unplug all drives except the destination drive during installation.

Years ago I got an installation crossed up like this and never bothered to fix it, just let it run off of both drives. After that experience I made it a point to unplug all the drives except the target drive during an install.