Removed storage drive and can't boot. Windows 8.1

[sprtfan]

I have a 120GB SSD boot drive and a 1.5TB drive I use for storage and a 640GB drive I keep most of my programs on. I removed the 1.5TB storage drive and my computer comes up with a message stating that I need to select drive to boot to or insert bootable media. (something close to this at least). Once I put the 1.5TB storage drive back in it booted fine.

I had already moved all of the data off the drive but noticed that 61GBs were still being used. I selected show system files from folder options and there is a Recycle folder and System Volume Information folder. I was guessing it was being used for restore points but I'm not sure if I under stand why removing it would keep the system from booting.

How can I remove this drive and still be able to boot?

 

[owensdj]

Have you tried removing the drive letter(s) for the 1.5TB drive then removing the drive?

 

[Dahak]

Was the 1.5TB drive hooked up when it was installed? by the sounds of it it boot the boot info on that drive.

You could disconnect it and boot the win8 install media and do a start up repair and it should automatically fix this

 

[postmortemIA]

if boot files are on that drive, you would have hidden Boot folder.

 

[sprtfan]

I'm not sure if the drive was in or not when I installed but I don't think it was. The System and Recovery partitions are on the SSD and are not located on the Storage drive that I tried to remove.
I can try removing the drive letter and I could try to disconnect the storage drive and try a repair as well.

 

[denis280]

I'm not sure if the drive was in

Probably was.

 

[sprtfan]

Figured out the problem. The boot order changed after removing the storage drive and it was trying to boot of the HDD that I used for programs and was why I was getting the error. I'm not sure why the boot order would change but I was able to fix it easy enough and everything is fine now. Thanks

 

[Ketchup]

Figured out the problem. The boot order changed after removing the storage drive and it was trying to boot of the HDD that I used for programs and was why I was getting the error. I'm not sure why the boot order would change but I was able to fix it easy enough and everything is fine now. Thanks

This is quite common when your boot drive is not in the first SATA port. A know that has baffled people in the past, so consider this a good lesson learned.