Solved Lost access to BIOS after adding a 2nd M.2 SSD

I loved the drive drawers, I used to have them in all my machines. It was sad to see them go away. I also had a nifty SATA/USB 2.5" enclosure that had a frame that mounted in the front bay. You just pressed the drive in like a microSD and it popped out. You could then use it with a USB cable, when you latched it in, it was a SATA drive.

I can't imagine going without these sorts of things on my main. I do PC repair and often times I need to check drives on a fully functional, more forgiving system. Plus my recovery tools are on my main so I use it to recover data for people who don't want to pay an arm and a leg for data recovery. Sometimes I can get away with just using a toaster but other times I have to use SATA. This is where my sleds come in very handy.

Scannerman said:

I can't imagine going without these sorts of things on my main. I do PC repair and often times I need to check drives on a fully functional, more forgiving system. Plus my recovery tools are on my main so I use it to recover data for people who don't want to pay an arm and a leg for data recovery. Sometimes I can get away with just using a toaster but other times I have to use SATA. This is where my sleds come in very handy.

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Not as big problem nowadays, just add one of these: SABRENT USB C Docking Station for M.2 PCIe/NVMe and SATA 2.5/3.5 Inch SSD & HDD with Offline Cloning. I have the earlier version without the NVMe capability, it's been very handy.

Yup. Toasters are handy. It's good to keep one's options open. Not all drives work well with USB. I use both.

I'll not buy from Sabrent ever again after three failed enclosures.

I learned the hard way so now I take no chances. One of the biggest messes I ever got into in my life was doing a clean install on a new NVME without disconnecting all the secondary drives. All was fine for a while.....until the secondary HDD died and the BCD died with it. After MUCH reading, I finally found a MS article that specifically stated Windows would install its BCD on the first EFI disk it SEES whether that disk is the system disk or not. My HDD was Disk 0. The new NVME was Disk 1.

I wish I had saved that MS article as proof to show any naysayers who don't believe us. Yes, one can have any number of secondary drives without disconnecting them...as long as those drives are configured as MBR or are drives with higher assigned drive numbers than is assigned to the system drive.
Since then, I've noticed that the OEM systems do assign lower drive numbers to SATA drives than NVME drives. I can not speak for custom boards.

Depending on one's drive configuration, it's my opinion this may also be the reason we are seeing so many boot issues after folks have cloned their drive.

glasskuter said:

Since then, I've noticed that the OEM systems do assign lower drive numbers to SATA drives than NVME drives. I can not speak for custom boards.

Depending on one's drive configuration, it's my opinion this may also be the reason we are seeing so many boot issues after folks have cloned their drive.

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Exactly! When I had the problem, I had two NVMe drives and one SATA SSD, the BCD was on the SATA drive and Windows was on one of the NVMe drives.

glasskuter said:

Depending on one's drive configuration, it's my opinion this may also be the reason we are seeing so many boot issues after folks have cloned their drive.

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The main reason people have boot issues after cloning their drive is because a true clone is an exact duplicate of the original. When both drives are left in the PC it does not know which drive to boot to and locks up. It is said that the system is "confused". When there are no other EFI partitions on any of the drives on the PC during an installation the EFI partition will be written to the selected drive upon which the operating system is to be installed. So, in theory you could have 24 drives all running on a PC and as long as none of them have a EFI partition you will write your boot strap to the drive you select for the OS.

Scannerman said:

The main reason people have boot issues after cloning their drive is because a true clone is an exact duplicate of the original. When both drives are left in the PC it does not know which drive to boot to and locks up. It is said that the system is "confused". When there are no other EFI partitions on any of the drives on the PC during an installation the EFI partition will be written to the selected drive upon which the operating system is to be installed. So, in theory you could have 24 drives all running on a PC and as long as none of them have a EFI partition you will write your boot strap to the drive you select for the OS.

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Not sure what's going on with EFI. As far as I can tell, my system uses some EFI partition to boot a disk without EFI on it (?).

Looking at my current setup:
Disk 0: is my old SSD disk used mostly for data.
Disk 1: is my old M.2 SSD that used (and still is able to) boot Win 11 Canary.
Disk 2: is my new M2.SSD larger disk to replace Canary with a standard version. It boots fine into Win 11 24H2. This was setup from a bootable Rufus.

The selection between Disk1 and 2, shows as a popup during boot with the options (Volume 11 or Volume 2 (I think)). Volume 11 is the Disk 2.

Why there's no EFI on disk 2, I don't know. Should I (somehow) force the creation of the EFI partition there?
I'm wondering what will happen if I format or remove the other two disks. Will the system even boot?

kanenas said:

Not sure what's going on with EFI. As far as I can tell, my system uses some EFI partition to boot a disk without EFI on it (?).

Looking at my current setup:
Disk 0: is my old SSD disk used mostly for data.
Disk 1: is my old M.2 SSD that used (and still is able to) boot Win 11 Canary.
Disk 2: is my new M2.SSD larger disk to replace Canary with a standard version. It boots fine into Win 11 24H2. This was setup from a bootable Rufus.

The selection between Disk1 and 2, shows as a popup during boot with the options (Volume 11 or Volume 2 (I think)). Volume 11 is the Disk 2.

Why there's no EFI on disk 2, I don't know. Should I (somehow) force the creation of the EFI partition there?
I'm wondering what will happen if I format or remove the other two disks. Will the system even boot?

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Pretty sure the answer is no. If you're going to take those other disks out, you need to fix that first!

Thanks.
I'll look into it.
Maybe Rufus or some partition manager has a way to copy EFI from disk 1...

kanenas said:

Thanks.
I'll look into it.
Maybe Rufus or some partition manager has a way to copy EFI from disk 1...

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MiniTool is good for this. Not sure about the free version.

Scannerman said:

MiniTool is good for this. Not sure about the free version.

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Good, I have MiniTool and I'll start with it.