FW16 Boot Drive Missing - Any Fix?

Community Support
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1

Hey friends,

I have a few laptops and I love tinkering with them, swapping drives, memory, etc pretty often. My FW16 seems like a match made in heaven considering how “tinkerable” everything is, BUT, I’ve consistently run into the following issue and I wanted to see if anyone might have a solution:

Whenever I do anything with either drive, the next time I boot, I get a “Boot Drive Missing” error with no apparent recourse, and have to end up formatting the machine and starting from scratch.

I have windows installed on the 2230 drive and if I swap out the 2280, I get this error on the next boot. Even if I remove both drives and then literally just reinstall them, I get this error. It’s like those birds that abandon their eggs if they can smell that another animal touched them.

It FEELS like this is probably some kind of security setting I’m just not aware of, but I would love any insight folks might have into why this is happening, and what–if anything–I can do to circumnavigate it. I even tried to use the built in windows 11 (windows 7 version) backup to reinstall the image and it just errored out.

I did message support about it a few days ago, but figured it might be worthwhile to ask here while I wait for their thoughts.

Thanks, and have a good one.

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I’ve actually been getting this error on and off for months without having swapped out my SSD at all. It only happens after my FW16 has been in Hibernation for a little while. No idea on timing because it’s always overnight. I wake up to that error and the fans kicked on at full tilt and a lot of heat coming from the bottom for some reason. Have yet to figure it out. Also running W11 on a 4TB 2280 SSD. I have a ticket to support on thermal issues referenced in this thread so hopefully I’ll get a new mainboard that will solve both issues, but I hope there’s a better solution.

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try new 3.0.5 bios?

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This could be secure boot possibly. Windows builds key based on the hardware in your system, and your windows activation key binds to it. (don’t quote me on the terminology) If you are moving one system (especially one sold as an OEM install) this would be something that would trip security. How this manifests is that it may just refuse to boot the system with the key not matching the hardware.

All speculation and a hunch.

What I would recommend is putting your Windows installs into a VM, and then moving that VM between machines. I realize this might not work with your particular situation though, so it is just a suggestion.