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Weird situation. I did a clean install a few months ago of 8.1 onto my laptop, which has a 1tb HDD and a 64gb SSD. I installed onto the HDD and use the SSD for additional storage & scratch files.
I needed to image a friend's failing HDD, so I pulled the SSD out and put theirs in. My system proceeded to boot from their hard drive.. I shut it down and pulled out the 2nd drive, and my system wouldn't boot.
Turns out that when I installed Windows, it placed some sort of system files onto the SSD, even though it's not the first physical drive, it's not listed in the bios boot order (I specifically removed it when I installed the drive) and I didn't instruct the installer to use that drive in any way. So if I remove that drive, which isn't the system disk and has no operating system files on it (or shouldn't), I brick my machine until I put it back in.
I googled around a bit and didn't find anything useful. What I basically need is the 8.1 equivalent to "sys c:". I stopped working at this level with Windows for the most part around the NT4 or 2k era.
Ok, I remembered something wrong. This happened several weeks ago and I only thought to post about it last night.
The SSD is set as the system partition. It shouldn't be, but it is.
So I'm looking into that now. It sure would be nice if you could actually manage the disks with the disk management tool MS provides.
I haven't tried running a repair yet. My experience with that process has been rather negative (I've used it two or three times over the years, and it's hosed the system every time). If push comes to shove, I'll image the disk and then try it but I'd really like to solve this without having to resort to that.
Not using the SSD for the OS because I didn't expect it to be permanently installed, and I also want to be able to replace/upgrade it for more space without screwing with the operating system.
What about creating a partition on C: and copying the entire drive S: to that partition, then making it drive S: ?
It is a kludge, but could work without messing things up too much..
I'm asking an obvious question, how does both your SSD boot and your friends HDD boot when both are out of the boot order in the bios, are you sure you disable the "right" drive in your bios, maybe you disabled the 1TB drive. Did the 8.1 installation change your BIOS settings, which I think is now possible.
Make an image and do the repair with the 8.1 DVD. I put an Win 7 image on a Mac Boot camp partition, I had to run the repair twice and was able to get it to boot, just saying you might have to try it twice.
In 2014 I' saw 480GB SSD as low as $160 after rebates next year you should be able to replace your 1TB drive with a SSD for under $200.
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