How to remove the second drive?

[John-the-Don]

I have a Pavilion desktop (Elite HPE 340ch). It came with a Seagate HDD. Now, I've added a Samsung SDD. So, I have two SATA drives connected, one the old HDD and one the new SDD.

The SSD comes up as disk C: and the HDD comes up as E: and F: (there's an external HDD on D:).

The machine boots from the SSD correctly (and of course, much faster).

I want to remove the old HDD, but how!?

If I simply disconnect the SATA cable, then when I boot I get a message saying there is a wiring problem and to check the cables.

I have gone through all the boot setup options, including disabling the HDD in the HDD boot group.

But nothing works - I have to boot with the old HDD connected via SATA cable.

How to remove the HDD? I guess I need to change something in the boot configuration? But what?

JD

[Prométhée]

hi

Sorry, maybe I don't understand everything you say ..
The ssd works, you boot fine with the SSD..
If this is the case, completely disconnect the HDD disk, sata cable, and power supply, remove the hard disk, it should work..
I did this not long ago
HDD disk connected, SSD disk connected, in order to make an image of the HDD, to copy it to the SSD!
once the image is made, disconnection of the HDD, and connection of the SSD instead of the HDD
the system reboots to the SSD
Then, connection of the HDD, on the second sata, no problem, the disk accessible under windows
All that remains is to format it in order to have the system SSD, and a second blank HDD data drive!

[John-the-Don]

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I was expecting the kind of result that you describe.

Unfortunately, during the prep for the disk cloning I screwed up something (somewhere in defragging the HDD and/or chkdsk /f ). Anyway, I had to recover my system as well as moving to the new SSD.

So, when the Samsung tool proposed creating the system "new" (instead of cloning the old disk) I did that. It all worked fine and I recovered all my old files from backup. Of course, I had a bit of reinstalling to do!

But, now I have a system like this:

   - C. the new system disk, SSD

   - 😧 an external hard drive (my backup)

   - E: the old HDD (which I "recovered" as a system and from which I launched the SSD tool).

That's already good, but I want to remove the old HDD (it still spins up, so I'm worried what happens if it ever crashes).

However, if I simply disconnect the SATA and power cables I get this message from Intel Realtek during the boot:

   "PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable"

Reconnect the SATA cable to the old HDD and the error goes away, but I still have the HDD as ddisk E:

I've tried modifying a number of disk-related options in the boot setup - but no success.

So, how to remove the HDD from the system!?

JD

[Prométhée]

Did you try what I said?
There I wonder if finally your computer, starts well with the SSD .. If you unplug your hard disk HDD, it obviously does not find windows!
I'll tell you what I did...
I installed a 500gb ssd, which I later replaced with a 1to one.
I connected the SSD to another sata port!
I cloned the hdd, ( acronis )to the sata SSD
to avoid any unpleasant surprises, once the ssd was finished, I removed the HDD, then I connected the SSD in its place..
reboot ok
I then connected the Hdd to another sata port, and no problem, boot on SSD, hdd accessible under window
The second time, I did the same thing again, copying the SSD to 1 tb, then setting up the 1tb instead of the 500 gb, no problem
If that doesn't work, there may be a problem with your copy on the SSD!
If you can restart the disk image then test
otherwise, you will have to redo a complete installation
If it's another problem then sorry, I have no other ideas at the moment.

[John-the-Don]

Thanks for sticking with the process...

I understand your puzzlement/scepticism. 

However, I think the disks are both ok.

The SSD has Windows 10 and the old HDD now has WIndows 7 (remember I said I had to recover using the HP recovery partition - which was WIndows 7 before upgrading some years ago).

So, now I've got two working disks both with a bootable system.

And indeed that's what shows up when I boot - I get a choice to boot either Win 10 (the first and default choice) or Win 7.

I guess somewhere in the boot configuration it says there are two disks, and if I simply remove the SATA cable it provokes the "check the cables" error.

I guess also a solution would be to plug a second SSD in place of the HDD.

Still, I'm frustrated that I can't get rid of the HDD just by reconfiguring something.

But what? It's hard to dig into the boot config and it will be easy to screw it up completely (I think!).

Thanks for help by the way - even if you've run out of ideas.

JD

[Prométhée]

ok, so I didn't see somewhere that you had configured a dual boot in fact, I didn't see that you had windows 7 on one and windows 10 on the other
So that explains the problem I think
If you remove the registered system disk, it continues to search for it!
this is a scenario, which I have never encountered
it is therefore necessary to remove this dual, but that I do not know how it is done
a long time ago, I did the opposite thing, I had two systems, but not the dual option at startup, I had configured it afterwards with software, but in this case, I do not see too much
So we have to manage to remove this, it has nothing to do with what I thought, changing the sata order, will not change this problem I think!
It must be at the level of the boot manager maybe, I don't know too much how it works
there I don't have much time to search, if you can't find it let me know tomorrow, does it work?

(edit]

investigate this, it doesn't seem safe to me, but this seems like the kind of solution to look for
only it was long before windows 10

https://support.microsoft.com/fr-fr/topic/supprimer-un-syst%C3%A8me-d-exploitation-d-un-ordinateur-%...

[John-the-Don]

Checking around (as one does!) I find others with 2 bootable systems.

It seems that I can get rid of the Win 7 bootable system by using Win+R and msconfig.

Indeed, my two systems show up there (in the Boot tab of msconfig).

The SSD with Win 10 is the default system.

The Win 7 system shows up second, not default, and if selected would let me press delete.

It's a bit scary pressing the "Delete" button though, so I'm hesitating!

And even then it may not allow me to unplug the HDD (which is hosting the Win 7 system).

JD

[Prométhée]

I edited my answer, which I also found
but frankly I can't tell you to do it or not
that said, if it crashes, you only have to reinstall windows 10, maybe it will just be enough to simply repair the startup!

[John-the-Don]

The story so far. I read the article that you linked - similar to some others I'd been reading. Which eventually convinced me to try to "delete" the Win 7 bootable system using msconfig. This didn't do anything to begin with because it never became the permananet config - always reverting after exiting msconfig. Eventually, I booted into Safe mode and ran msconfig there. This has permanently removed the Win 7 system from the boot options. 

And now I don't get the option to boot either Win 10 or Win 7. It just boots into Win 10. So that's a step forward!

However, if I remove the SATA cable from the disk and reboot, I get the same message: "media test failure, check cable" - I guess somewhere it's configured to expect two bootable disks and barfs if it doesn't find them.

This message is coming from something called "Intel UNDI", and says:

    Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller

    PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

So, I'll dig a bit deeper into that. 

And thanks for the help thinking about the problem 🙂

JD

[Prométhée]

Boring if not enough..
there must be a trace somewhere, but I don't really see what
the error message, unless there is an error, indicates that the system wants to start from the network, since it cannot find the bootable drive, something it cannot do, logic, it must have been configured
There all I think is to try, completely unplug the player!
restart the computer, and go directly into the bios, check the boot options, choose the drive, validate and test..
if not better then, you have to try to reconfigure the boot, with the repair options maybe

maybe this

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/fix-windows-10-wont-boot-startup-repair-bootrec/

Startup Repair.

and or

BOOTREC /FIXMBR

I know there are several solutions
but for me purely theoretical, because I never needed to repair my computers of this type of problems
I don't even do recovery in 20 years of use