Bad secondary drive, Windows won't boot

[Haole Boy]

Working on a Dell XPS 8930 with a Toshiba 2TB C: drive and two each Seagate 1TB drives for data (they are drives taken from older systems).

Customer brought it in with a "won't boot" complaint. Tried to boot from my Gandalf's Win10 PE USB drive, takes a very long time and I eventually get a "Preparing Automatic Repair" message, so I figure the PE boot failed and it was now trying to boot off the internal hard drive which was not working

Got system to boot using a Linux Mint USB drive. Ran gSmartControl. "C" drive checks out OK. One of the Seagate drives also checks out OK. The third drive has literally no information about it in gSmartControl, so I'm thinking it's busted in some fashion.

Disconnected both Seagate drives and system boots up fine on the Toshiba drive!

Question for the experts: Since the Toshiba (C drive seems to be working fine, why would the failure of one of the other internal drives cause the system to not boot? Could it be that since they were originally system drives that were just taken out of old machines and put in this one that somehow the system is trying to boot from the broken one? How could I tell?

FWIW, the BIOS is at 1.1.7, latest is 1.1.12 but there is no description about what was fixed / added to the new BIOS.

Mahalo,

Harry Z

 

[Porthos]

why would the failure of one of the other internal drives cause the system to not boot? Could it be that since they were originally system drives that were just taken out of old machines and put in this one that somehow the system is trying to boot from the broken one? How could I tell?

Did you test both of the drives outside of the machine?
Does the 2 drives still all of the original partitions as they were just old drives from other computers? If they test good I would Fabs the data and format the drives and put them back if that is what the client wants. (2 spare drives with data)

 

[Sky-Knight]

Windows 10 feature updates are HORRIBLE about putting the system partition in the wrong place if it sees another one somewhere. This is the primary reason why I leave replacement OS disks offline these days. Too much risk of time bomb later.

 

[seashore]

why would the failure of one of the other internal drives cause the system to not boot?

Typical behaviour - the PC still has to try to enumerate all connected drives while it boots and is having a hard time figuring out what the faulty drive is.

And yeah ... Seagate.

 

[Haole Boy]

Thanks for the replies.

@seashore I was kinda hoping that the PC would just issue a warning level message on the bad hard drive and continue with boot, but I guess not.

@Sky-Knight Interesting to know, but doesn't seem to be the case here.

@Porthos I disconnected the two "old" drives and the system boots up with no problems. One of the old drives is definitely bad (no response of any kind), but the other one seems to be working OK.

Found a couple of errors on the the C: drive and the one working old drive is pretty old. Customer is going to upgrade to a 1TB SSD and consolidate all his stuff onto one drive.

Thanks for the responses,

Harry Z

 

[MDD1963]

Even without issues pertaining to boot order, I've had marginal SATA spinning drives then cause a system that normally loads WIn10 from NVME in 15 seconds to degrade to 90 seconds, presumably taking file/folder/hardware inventory on a failing drive...; it would not surprise me to have one bad enough to gum up the entire works whenever connected....

 

[Sky-Knight]

Oh yes, if you have a drive on a system that's confusing the SATA bus, it'll hang the controller... which either delays or prevents boot.

The BIOS usually throws the alert if SMART trips, but the thing is... SMART almost never trips. So bad drive makes controller grumpy is normal. I didn't expect this to be the situation here, because this reality has been normal since RLL hit the shelf, and I suspect only a few here even remember what that is!