How do I get w11 to boot from the right drive? My reboot broke, and I have to manually override

my reboot broke.
It's supposed to boot from disk3, but it doesn't automatically find the boot file or whatever.
I have to go into the bios and boot override into disk3 to start windows.
Bios allows me to boot override from disk0 or disk3.

Windows starts fine when I manually select disk3. Now I just need it to do it automatically each time I reboot.

In the distant past, I installed windows on disk0 SATA SSD. In picture below, you can see an EFI partition, and drive E: used to have Windows on it until I dirty reformatted the partition.
Until a recent random crash, reboot has always worked and re/booted into disk3 NVME SSD.

I think the boot process is now looking for the boot file on disk0 and crashing because it can't find it.
it is not seeing that my boot partition is on disk3.
I think the bootloader is on disk0 while my Windows drive is on disk3. So I need to move the bootloader to disk3?

Can anyone point me to instructions how to redo the whole boot process so that it always boots from disk3?

none of the fixes I tried worked.
startup repair, bootrec fixmbr etc etc and all those other commands don't do anything or fail.

I think I have to manually rebuild the whole boot somehow.

To troubleshoot Windows 10 or Windows 11 boot problem, just follow the instructions in this guide, and hopefully you will fix the not booting problem in no time.

link626 said:

Can anyone point me to instructions how to redo the whole boot process so that it always boots from disk3?

Click to expand...

I didn't notice it mentioned but has it been tried moving the cable of the desired bootable drive to a different SATA port on the motherboard such as to 0 or 1 then choosing that in the BIOS and Save the setting when exiting the BIOS?

The only real issue with changing the cabling is if programs are installed upon a drive other than the boot/system/OS drive and the drive letters change. This goes along with having only one drive connected in a computer when doing the initial install of the OS, add other drives later.

Have you tried to change hard disk boot priority in BIOS so the desired disk is first? This should book automatically without having to override every time. That's the reason why I insist that the Windows disk is ALWAYS connected on SATA 0. To avoid such issues. My colleague argues that Windows 10/11 can automatically detect the boot disk and it doesn't make any difference. Yes, it does make a difference. You learnt that the hard way...

spapakons said:

Have you tried to change hard disk boot priority in BIOS so the desired disk is first? This should book automatically without having to override every time. That's the reason why I insist that the Windows disk is ALWAYS connected on SATA 0. To avoid such issues. My colleague argues that Windows 10/11 can automatically detect the boot disk and it doesn't make any difference. Yes, it does make a difference. You learnt that the hard way...

Click to expand...

this helped.

i found the option hidden in BBS priorities. I was able to select m1 to boot first.

you can see my drive loadout...

if i wanted to fully eliminate the other broken boot option, is it as simple as deleting the efi partition on that drive?