OK guys, I need some understanding here. I got an Acer laptop last year with a 1TB spinner in it. I opened it and noticed it had an m.2 slot, so I bought an SSD for it. At the time, I opted to just clone the old OS drive onto the SSD. I kept the spinner for data and just deleted the Windows and Program File folders rather than reformatting it. Fast forward to the present and I bought a 2TB spinner to replace the old one. I copied all the data (file copy, not disk copy because I figured I didn’t need all the old leftover files from the OS anyway) onto the new 2TB drive, then swapped the 2TB into the laptop and I get no boot file error. It confused me because Windows is on my m.2 and I never touched it. So I removed the 2TB and it still said no boot file. Only when I put the original 1TB drive in (with all the Windows files deleted) will it boot.
Is this an issue of the laptop booting to GPT on the spinner, then loading from the SSD? Is that even possible? I KNOW it’s not loading Windows from the spinner because it’s not on there lol.
Secure Boot is on, UEFI mode. I’m guessing I can just install the 2TB and boot my Windows thumb drive and start over, but not even sure now. Is it possible the m.2 slot isn’t bootable? I thought I had it all figured out, but I’m at a loss now.
The problem is probably that the Windows EFI and boot partitions are on the original 1TB disk. They are not visible inside windows. Without the EFI boot partition it won’t boot as there is no boot loader.
Thanks. I honestly don’t know how the m.2 doesn’t have the boot info tbh. I now remember that after I cloned, I did a fresh install 6 months later so I would have thought everything would be on the m.2 already. I think this time I’ll remove all other drives lol.
Windows is fucky about this. Whatever disk is seen as first by the bios is the disk windows will install the bootloader to. Doesnt matter if that is the disk windows gets installed to or not.
You can in theory fix it without a fresh install but the time it would take to reinstall windows is probably about the same time it would take to fix it manually by resizing partitions and loading the correct files on said partition.
I’m almost positive BIOS sees the SATA drive before the m.2 drive, so that makes sense. I’ll just remove the spinner before installing Windows to make sure. Installing Windows is a breeze; it’s all the programs, settings, 2FA and registry tweaks that takes so much time. Guess I need to start making backups after fresh installs lol.