Every now and then, when Windows crashes, and I have to reset my PC, the motherboard only detects 1 or 2 of my 4 SATA2 hard disks. It’s always the ones connected to the 3rd and 4th sockets (so it says on the board), but these are actually the 1st and 2nd devices as seen by both Windows and Linux.

So today, after removing 2 currently un-used and un-powered drives from the case, I swapped the cables around (and tidied them using some spare spiral wrap), so that it would stop moving the main boot drive to be third in the boot order preference list.

But of course, Windows didn’t like this, and I got an ever-so-helpful message on boot:

NTLDR is missing.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

The fix was easy, I just swapped the cables back.

while ($system->has_changed()) { show_unhelpful_error_message(); }

Grub (The standard Linux boot loader) can handle you moving drives around… It barely blinked on mine; it just said “invalid path” (or something along those lines), and was very easy to correct.

But Windows? Oh no! That’s far to difficult… *sigh*.