Robert in CA wrote:
I decided to test the external hd with the 8500 Mrimgs and
it was textbook:

https://postimg.cc/FktWGxgh

https://postimg.cc/sBvTrLTV

https://postimg.cc/jwfvW7Vm

https://postimg.cc/tnt5kG4z

This is what the other external hd should be doing. If this
external hd can connect then why can't the other and I've
changed the Startech cases, plugs etc and hd's? It doesn't
make any sense?? It's like the backspace key and we've
tested everything for that. What the hell is causing this?

Why will the Patriot Key and the Mrimg external hd work
but not the other?

Robert


Let's look at the third picture.

https://postimg.cc/jwfvW7Vm

The active is on different partitions on the two drives.

Are these both for the XPS 8500 ?

Or is one a 780 disk, the other an 8500 disk (the 1TB one) ?

*******

I would think, if you applied Macrium boot repair to the
2TB drive, Macrium might behave "baffled by it all". I presume
both of these disks, in Disk Management, are declared as being
GPT disks.

When disks are "repaired by the OS", when there is a boot
problem, usually the OS does not have the means to go messing
around with the structures it finds. It's allowed to do CHKDSK,
but not generally put back an entire set of boot files to go
with the BCD boot menu file. The OS startup repair is not
an OS re-installation, in effect.

Before I go moving stuff on a disk, I try to make sure each
of the partitions, has the files I expect to find on it. The
ESP should have a Microsoft folder on it, with some Windows materials.
The Recovery, I would expect to find a K:\Boot sort of thing,
with the BCD file in it. And that would be the Active partition.
I would feel good then, about moving the Active flag to the
partition with the \Boot\BCD on it. And I would expect the
big C: partition, to have a C:\Windows . With all of the
various structures verified as being in place, if I were to
run the Macrium boot repair on the 2TB, I would then expect it
to work.

So that's the big picture.

Now, we can do things like this with "diskpart".
You could run that from the Macrium Command Prompt window
if you wanted, just before Boot Repair time. (Macrium has a couple
useful icons in the lower left of the Boot CD screen.)

with the 2TB inide the 8500, the sequence would be:

1) Boot from Macrium CD.
2) Find the black Command Prompt icon in the lower left, open it.
It runs as Administrator.
3) diskpart
list disk

select disk 0 # The only disk in the machine

list partition # One of the partitions is 26GB, we select that one
select partition 1 # Now selecting the 26GB partition, might be partition 1.
detail partition # Want to find out whether it is Active
active # Make it Active, if it wasn't Active

select partition 2 # Double-check, only one partition is active
detail partition # Have a look
inactive # Remove the active flag, if it is inadvertently asserted.
exit # quit from diskpart

This is not the whole sequence, this is just to show that the
"Detail Partition", tells you about the Active flag.

https://i.postimg.cc/fbS0Hkpy/active-flag-edit.gif

Paul