Issue with slave HDD that was setup as a dynamic disk Windows 7

manns41078

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3
Location
United States
Hi everyone.
I've run into a situation I've never seen before.
My HDD setup is as follows on my laptop:
NTFS (pretty sure)
Primary drive is a small 32GB ssd where Windows 7 was installed
Secondary drive is a 320GB WD blue that seems to be failing.
After a couple BSOD crashes I pulled the drives and checked them out. The primary was readable on other machines and passed various tests. The secondary spins up, will appear in the device manager, but will not appear as a drive. So I'm assuming it's fried. Oddly though I NEED to have this drive installed in the laptop for it to boot up... otherwise it says no boot device exists.

I think this is because I set the disk up as a dynamic disk. I also set up the primary this way probably due to its small size and I was likely experimenting with trying to make the 2 drives look as they were one.

If I have both drives connected I can boot just fine, but windows won't recognize the secondary 320GB drive. However the BIOS notices it and it appears in Windows Disk Management, but it appears as unconnected and will not let me reconnect it. Disk Management does show 2 partitions on the disk. One of which is a small 100MB partition that I assume Windows has written boot info to. It looks like the typical "System Reserved" partition which is usually on the primary drive.

I'm not sure how I did that, but I'll be trying to avoid it when/if I reinstall Windows.

It would be nice not to have to reinstall Windows.
Does anyone know if I can fix this without reinstalling Windows? Can I make a System Reserved partition on the primary drive?

Thanks for the help!
 
IMO, repair install is unnecessary and is pretty much just reinstalling Windows at that point. Try fixing the bootloader:

Boot off your Windows 7 install DVD, and select the 'Repair my computer' link on the bottom left corner of the window. Then select "Startup repair" and let that attempt to automatically repair. If this fails, then you'll need to recreate it manually:

Scroll to the "For Windows 7 and Windows Vista" section under Option 1:
http://www.tweakhound.com/2012/11/13/how-to-fix-the-windows-bootloader/
 
Thanks, that might be a better solution, though I did try a simple startup repair and windows wouldn't even recognize the primary drive... but that was with the secondary removed... maybe it will work with the secondary drive in... but then it will likely try to repair the bootloader that appears to be stored on the secondary drive and probably won't get anywhere.

I'll give the options in the link a go and report back (after I get my new disk next week).
If that doesn't work then not a big deal to reinstall Windows on the computer as the SSD's speed makes it super fast.
Cheers
 
You'll want to remove the drive that does not contain your OS before doing those commands.
 
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