So, I've installed Win7 32bit on my original HD, which is a Westgate 500GB (sata). I wanted to transfer some old files from my old HD which is IDE connected. After connecting the old HD, I can't boot back in Win7 with the IDE HD removed. I get an error, asking for my boot disk. It seems to only boot correctly with both HD installed. Any way I can fix this so it will only boot with my sata hd?
hello and welcome
go to your BIOS and check the first boot. set the first boot contain win7 system HDD.
then F10 to save and quit. that's should be work.
Can you give us a screen snip of Disk Management with both HD's connected ?
StartComputer Management
From the screenshot, I can guess that when you installed the new 500GB hard disk and then installed Windows 7, the original IDE hard disk was still installed, right?
The reason why you can't boot when it is removed, is because the Windows Installer, even though you selected a different hard disk to install to, placed the required boot code onto what was perceived as the system boot disk:
D: is marked as "System, Active". This meanss it's the boot drive.
All I can do to try to help is to ask you to again remove the IDE hard disk, then boot from the Windows 7 DVD and use the Repair options. This might find and resolve the problem for you.
No, I built this PC 2yrs ago with the sata disk. Just recently, I decided to pull some old files from the IDE disk. Though, I have booted once with the IDE disk which had Vista installed.
It looks like the 100mb System Reserved partition which boots Win7 was somehow deleted and is now unallocated space.
Regardless of reason, you must now recover System Active MBR to the Win7 HD for it to boot independently without the Vista HD.
To do this unplug the Vista HD, boot from the Win7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD, mark Win7 partition Active: Partition - Mark as Active
Next boot back into DVD Repair console or Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots until Win7 starts on its own.
You can also recover the 100 mb unallocated space into Win7 while marking Win7 active using free Partition Wizard bootable CD before you run the repair.
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