This week’s weekly came in late because to be honest, I was feeling a little burned out from work, as well as helping out with covid-19 related projects. The pace that I was working at kind of killed off my desire to do anything computer-related in my free time.
Case in point, I can’t remember the last interesting thing I did the past week, my new NAS is still sitting there, underutilized. But hey, it’s the start of a 3 day weekend so maybe next week’s entry would have something interesting.
After thinking really hard about it, I actually did fix an interesting problem that my windows desktop had for the past couple months (year?).
Context
My desktop has been slowly upgraded/rebuilt over the years. Some parts are probably older than 6 years old, but some are relatively new. What I ended up with was a desktop with 4 drives in it.
- 500GB NVME SSD Samsung 960 EVO
- 500GB NVME SSD Samsung 970 EVO
- 500GB SSD Crucial MX100
- 2TB Seagate HDD
The 2TB drive is probably the oldest of them all, the crucial SSD replaced an even older SSD (OCZ Vertex 3) to be my main OS drive. Then I reinstalled Windows again when I finally upgraded my entire system to make use of 960 NVME SSD.
Because I wanted to do a Hackintosh, I bought the 970 EVO to run MacOS. And I scrapped that install after a few months because it was underutilized. It’s underutilized cause it’s a little unstable, which is to expected as I didn’t select the parts with the idea of creating a Hackintosh in the first place. So now the 970 EVO is just being used as an extremely fast storage for running VMs.
I notice that when booting up my system from time to time, my computer will show the error of Operating System Not Found/Missing. Which required me to restart, and manually select the boot drive. This revealed to me that, the windows efi boot partition was installed on the wrong drive.
- C: drive <- OS installed
- D: drive <- storage
- E: drive <- boot efi partition
Apparently, this is caused by a quirk in Windows when you’re doing multiple installations over time in a system where there are many drives.
Solution
The solution is simple, just tedious.
- I had to migrate the data out from whatever affected drives
- Disconnect all other drives except the one I want windows to be installed on
- Full install windows with only one drive attached (wipe everything)
- Use diskpart to manipulate and delete the protected EFI partition from the old offending disk (Refer to the guide from here)
- Open up disk manager to check if the partitions in old disk is removed correctly
- Expand the storage on old disk to fully utilize the disk space
Voila! I finally fixed the partition running in the right place. But I was unable to recover 400MB from the original drive. I think it’s due to the sector being in front of the main partition. It would take more effort to reclaim that space than to just let it be.
So far, I have not faced the Operating System Not Found/Missing anymore. Boot up times have sped up slightly, noticeable but the amount of time I save from each boot up will never amount to the amount of time I spend fixing this issue. However, shut down times have improved significantly, to the point where it’s almost instant. But my guess is that I simply have less services running that needs to be terminated.
Looking forward to WSL2 being released, but hoping that I don’t have to do this all over again.