Will this corrupt the files ?

Hi

Last year I put a 2 TB HDD to my system and today I put another 2 TB HDD. They are Seagate Barracuda HDD. They were purchased from different vendors. I have a strange problem. Both HDDs are bootable. In old HDD I had installed Win 8 Pro x64 and Win 8.1 Enterprise x64. In the New HDD I have installed Win 8.1 Enterprise x64 and Win 10 Enterprise x64. The problem is I enter BOOT Menu in BIOS at start up to choose which HDD to choose for booting and then when OS shows Win 8.1 and Win 10, I select my choice of CS to boot.

The problem is in BIOS boot menu it shows same serial number for both HDDs. Will this corrupt my files when I copy files from one HDD to another ?

It shows

HDD1 - ST2000DM001-1ER1HC
HDD2 - ST2000DM001-1ER1HC

The 1ER1HC is same in both HDDs.

I suspect the 1ER1HC to which you are referring is actually the drive's firmware revision number, rather than the drive's serial number.

Or possibly, 1ER1HC the Seagate Part Number, with the ST2000DM001 being the Seagate Model Number.

Seagate Serial Numbers, tend to be in the eight to nine digit range, rather than six digits, at least this is the case for the few recent Seagate SATA drives I currently have to examine.


BigDog

Thank you bigdogguru. I will report this to Seagate and ask more about it. I have connected both HDD and am using it since 4 hours but till now there is no problem. Maybe as you said it might be the firmware version.

Personally, I am hesitant to have two Windows hard drives active at the same time. I work in IT and have seen install programs "cross pollinate" when two \windows directories are present. The best would be to get drive enclosures that have a physical key to turn off the power of the unused drive. As far as copying files between identical drives, one safeguard would be to make sure each has it's own volume name.

Larry G

this is probably the same HDD with 2 partitions

SunnySkyguy said:

this is probably the same HDD with 2 partitions

Click to expand...

I suspect not, most system BIOS and SATA drive controller firmware, particularly those in desktop systems, lack the ability to detect or recognize drive partitions on boot, which typically falls under the OS purview. Even the majority of the advanced RAID controllers one would often find in today's Intel based high performance desktop or server system also lack this capability, their abilities are typically limited to the physical and virtual disk/drive management level.

Seagate provides a DOS based boot utility, SeaTools for DOS, which is used to retrieve most of the pertinent information of a Seagate drive and run tests for troubleshooting:

SeaTools for DOS tutorial



BigDog

To check serial numbers of your drives when Windows is running...

* Right-click on a drive and select Properties. Click on the tab 'Hardware'. It opens a list of drives and their serial numbers. Highlight a drive in the list, then click Properties. This will bring up a new window. Click the tab 'Details' and you should see a list of 30 or 40 different descriptors.

* Drive properties can also be examined via the Disk Management window.

* Also in Device manager, under 'Disk drives'.

This could be in the realm of needing a bios update. I would recommend having only one drive connected while doing the flash update, especially if it's a flash program in Windows. Most bios updates are fixes for handling larger hard drives or newest versions of Windows.

Larry G