Trying to run 2 SSD's after cloning stock to a new SSD

jgerondale2

Hello, im new here and not the most computer intelligent person but i know the basics. I am having alot of trouble getting 2 ssd's running on my Powerspec G434 i got a couple months ago. It came stock with a 1 TB WD Blue ssd, and i just bought a Samsung 970 EVO+. I wanted to use the EVO for booting, and my COD:MW since it is huge, and then use my stock WD for all my media and other games/ files. So i am able to clone my stock WD to my new EVO, and they both work seperately. Meaning with just 1 or the other plugged into the PC it boots and works just fine. But when i plug them both in (EVO in the M.2 NVME, and the stock WD into a PCIE x4 adapter into the x16 port) it boots but turns the EVO to offline and when i go into Disk Manager and turn it back online, it will only boot from the WD and if i actually pull the WD out and try to run just the EVO it will blue screen on boot saying i need to repair something in my computer. Can i have my Win10 on both SSD's and have them both connected to my PC? Or do i have to wipe my WD and just have my OS on my EVO. Also i read something about changing the MBR digital signature unique id by 1 character? Cannot seem to find anything online with this exact situation. If anyone can help that would be great. I apologize for the long post.

Thanks, Jake.

PowerSpec_MikeW

I would ask you to boot to the WD drive and check your event viewer. Look under Custom Views > Administrative Events. See if you're getting an event ID 158. It'll state that disk 1 and 0 share the same identifier and that would explain why it's putting that disk offline. We can dig into this for you. Would it be easier though just to wipe one of the drives, and change the install path in the Battle.net client so that it installs COD:MW to that drive?

jgerondale2

No 158, but alot of other event id's. First ones were just from booting right now with just the EVO plugged in. Then i plugged the WD in and booted and turned the EVO back online, rebooted and made sure the WD is boot priority #1 (even though it would just boot as #2 because it wont boot from EVO when they are both plugged in). Took a snip of the event log and will attach here. I have no idea what the other errors are from. Its a new PC and i didnt mess with any system stuff i really have just put a couple games on and then have been trying to clone the SSD and had to clean the new one a couple times and clone it again trying to figure this out.

jgerondale2

This is my Disk Management with both plugged in but of course after turning the EVO back online. Probably not important but just want to give any details that possibly could help. My EVO is in the M.2 and the WD is in the x16 slot. That is the slots i want to run them in. When i have cloned i have been putting WD in the M.2 and EVO in the x16 then switch but first boot with only the EVO in the M.2.
Disk 0 is WD
Disk 1 is EVO
I have also seen them flip flopped where D drive (EVO) was disk 0 and vice versa. 

PowerSpec_MikeW

Lets see if the GUID's match. Open powershell or command prompt and type "DiskPart". Then we'll do this:

select disk 0
uniqueid disk
select disk 1
uniqueid disk

Lets see if they're identical.

jgerondale2

Here is a snip of it, they are different id's. Also, those event id errors in the previous post, are they something to worry about? I have been powering down properly.

PowerSpec_MikeW

You'll have a lot of errors in event viewer. I see the system was powered off unexpectedly twice in the snip. So long as this was something that you were doing, then there's nothing to worry about. That's the GUID and they do not match, so that's good. Do you have secure boot turned on in the BIOS?

jgerondale2

I am not sure what that is. Here is a picture of my bios under the BOOT tab.

PowerSpec_MikeW

It would be under the security tab.

jgerondale2

It is disabled.

PowerSpec_MikeW

Okay. So everything should be good there, lets look at this as more of an issue with the cloned drive. Just to sum up what you said. You can still boot to the factory drive. You can put the Samsung drive online and access it, however if you remove the WD drive and boot to the Samsung drive, it BSOD's? Whats the code? Or it boot fine alone, but BSOD's if you select it from the F11 menu with the WD drive installed?

jgerondale2

So, after i clone from the WD to the EVO, i shut it down, and i can pull 1 or the other out and boot perfect with just using 1 of them at a time. But if i try to boot with both of them plugged in, it turns the EVO offline, and then i can turn it back online but if i then pull the WD out and try to boot off the EVO it blue screens with the repair message. With them both plugged in i cant boot from the EVO because it just goes to the next priority until it boots from the WD. But i can always still boot from the WD. Its only the EVO that gets messed up when i boot them together. I would like the EVO to be my boot because its faster. Just to verify, it is possible to have my same win10 version and digital signature or w.e on both drives so both drives are bootable, but could use both and just choose which one i want to boot from, correct? I dont know what you mean by selecting it from F11 menu. You mean to boot off the EVO when they are both installed? One thing i read is to do it you have to either wipe the stock one or one you are going to use for media (WD), and other option is to change the unique id for the MBR, but i dont know if that one is true.
Yes i can turn EVO back online and go in and access its documents. just cant boot from it once i plug the WD back in(Both plugged in)
To add, I have been using MiniTool Shadowmaker's cloning tool.

PowerSpec_MikeW

You're correct, it's a disk signature collision. So what's happening here is when you boot to the original drive and it recognizes the new drive, it puts it offline due to the signature collision. When you put it online, it generates and assigns a new GUID. And at that point the disk won't work. Lets go over some issues here and give you some suggestions.

First, I'm not sure why you're doing it this way. I would just clone the Samsung drive again, wipe the WD drive. If you're not able to do this, do it from the recovery environment or bootable windows media and clean it via diskpart. I'll provide instructions on this if you want. Then install to the old drive via Battle.net.

Second issue is you have a license for one windows copy, you're trying to run two. You technically do need two licences for what you're doing.

Now for the fix, the guides are on. What should work is copying the GUID string from the WD drive, we pulled this earlier with the "Uniqueid disk" command. The command to change it is "uniqueid disk id=<GUID>". Paste in the one from the WD drive and change the last few characters. It's hex, so 0-9 and a-f only or you'll get an error.

jgerondale2

I have thought about doing that but would like to have a extra bootable drive, even though i have the win10 recovery on a flash drive. If i change that uniqueid for the WD drive, would they both be bootable and both work seperate or both installed?
But what your saying is its better, or atleast more common, to just have the win10 and boot stuff on 1 of the drives(EVO) and rest of my stuff on the secondary (WD)? I think it might be easier to just do that at this point, but im not sure how to do it because in order to keep my boot files working on my EVO i cant plug both in, i would have to only have the WD plugged in after i clone to the EVO and somehow wipe that WD drive even though its the only one "in use". So if you have instructions on that i would appreciate that.

PowerSpec_MikeW

Ideally they both be bootable at that point. You're changing the GUID string on the Samsung drive, not he WD. Keep that as something to clone from just in case. So far as having a bootable drive, if you want that option to be able to recover on the fly, just do an image backup to an external and create bootable media. You can reload from the image and be back up on a new drive in no time at all.

jgerondale2

That sounds pretty good. I can do that to a flash drive? Or does it have to be a ssd or hdd? If i can do something like that then i could just wipe the WD. The goal is to be using the faster EVO for boot, and the WD (the stock drive) as media drive.
How do i wipe the WD drive? With only that drive plugged in and the EVO not plugged in.

PowerSpec_MikeW

It's an image, it's going to be as large as the installation itself, so probably at least 40GB. You would probably want to use an external for this.

Recovery environment. Make sure the Samsung drive is bootable. Swap the drives. Boot from your windows 10 bootable flash drive. As soon as you're in the recovery environment do Shift + F10 to open command prompt. Then do the following.

list disk
select disk # (# being the number for the WD drive. Remove the Samsung to be safe)
clean

This will wipe the drive. Reinstall the Samung drive and boot normally. Go into disk management and format the WD drive, it'll be unallocated at this point.

jgerondale2

Ok so i am doing this with ONLY the WD installed and the flash drive with win10 correct? I just finished re-cleaning and cloning my Samsung and is now bootable but not plugged in.

PowerSpec_MikeW

Yes, make sure the Samsung is good to go, then just use the WD. It makes it simple,  you don't want to clean the wrong drive.

jgerondale2

Im not sure what you mean by recovery envirement. When i boot from the flash drive it gives me all these different options but none are called "recovery environment". There is a recovery one though, and a command prompt one. But shift f10 doesnt do anything.

Also, when im done doing the wipe in command prompt, whichever way i get in there, do i then just hit the power button on my case to turn it off? Or is there something i type in command prompt to turn it off or something.

jgerondale2

Nevermind i just went into command prompt and did it. Now its formatted and everything is good! Thank you very much for the help!

PowerSpec_MikeW

Yes, sorry for the slow response there but you did everything correct. You should be good to go now.

jgerondale2

Hello TSMikeW, sorry to bug again but i have a quick question. Everything we did is working great, but im thinking of doing a different setup now haha. Atleast for my fathers PC. He has the same powerspec G434 as i do. My question is, with a dual or quad(just using 2 drives) M.2 NVME to PCEI3 x4 or x16, if i put them as RAID 0, will the adapter/drives pass the data through 4 channels since it is in RAID 0? Or even though it is RAID 0, 2 drives in the adapter would use 8 channels. Because i only have a couple x1 slots and 1 x16 slot on mobo but the x16 slot actually only has 4 channels. There isnt metal contacts through the entire x16 port. Just 4 channels worth. I know if i didnt use RAID 0 with the 2 cards i would need 8 or 16 channels. Just wondering if i Raid 0 them if it uses 4.
Thanks, Jake.

PowerSpec_MikeW

You'll be using to separate cards, preferably at x4 speeds, so all in all, you are consuming 8 PCIe lanes. The 9700K has 16 PCIe lanes (Dedicated to the GPU), the Z390 chipset provides an additional 24 lanes, so you won't have any problem here running multiple M.2 drives.

Now, I'm not a huge fan or RAID 0. The initialization of the RAID array hurts your startup time and the performance gains are pretty minimal in the real world in my opinion. I'd just add the second drive as storage. Windows makes moving data around automatically pretty easy now.

jgerondale2

ohh ok gotchya. ya we have the actual x16 taken by our gpu, so only other slots are obviously the m.2 which is taken, and then a couple x1's(which would be terrible speeds) and a x16 port but it only supports a x4 channel/adapter card. so for full speed i can really only have 2 ssds plugged in like we did to my pc. But good info thanks for the info on the RAID 0, i wont use it i will just get 1 bigger drive.
Thanks again for all the help.