Can't remove old disk

Hi all,

I've spent my whole sunday afternoon with this and I'm stuck. I've had an XP on a disk(Drive "C", 60GB IDE), then I bought another disk(Drive "F", 500GB SATA). After that I installed Windows 7 32bit on the new disk. The problem starts when I want to remove the old disk from the system, because it just doesn't boot from "F", when it's all alone. The same problem occurs when I change the disk priority in BIOS: only loads 7 when both disks are in the computer and the old one is the first in BIOS.(Not the boot priority, but something about priority among disk drives...). When I open the computer management it regards the old disk as system partition, the new one as boot. Both disks have one primary NTFS partitions, active. Also I can't change the drive letter of "F" to "C"(after old "C" is renamed), because it says: "The parameter is incorrect.".

I could've done something wrong during the installation but I don't remember that I asked Windows to split between the two drives...

I've tried to disconnect the old disk, then reboot from the recovery disk but it didn't find any errors and didn't solve the problem either. I've tried to move the boot manager to the new disk(however I'm not sure it's on the wrong disk). Like this: Moving Boot manager to Different Drive
It didn't help at all.
I really don't want to reinstall the OS so any idea would be welcome.

Thanks for reading

Thank you, it helped!

I needed to do another recovery startup with the CD but it's ok now. Only thing is I still can't name my only(!) remaining disk drive "C" but it's not a major problem. If you have time for a solution for that I would still be glad.

Thanx again

Don't try and change the drive letter - you will get into all kinds of trouble.

SIW2 said:

Don't try and change the drive letter - you will get into all kinds of trouble.

Never change a drive letter unless you are formatting the drive and using it for say... storage. Example , adding a 2nd drive and naming it S:Storage or X:Y:Z: if you change a drive letter and you have data on it and you try to access it, you will be pointing to the wrong drive.


Now to your original problem , are you trying to do a dual boot? Sounds like you want to get rid of XP and just have W7 on the new drive.

Ok I won't change the drive letter. And yes, I wanted to get rid of the xp and it worked!

You should have removed your XP drive and then did your install , your new drive would now be C:

Zomby88 said:

You should have removed your XP drive and then did your install , your new drive would now be C:

Ahhh, Go ahead, reinstall. You didn`t use your key already did you?

Hi!

I did use my key so never mind. Now I know I should've removed the xp but I didn't think it would be a problem. Next time I'll be more careful. It's the second and final time I say it's done, I'm not bothered about the drive letter issue anymore. Thank you all for your help.

Remove the old HDD and run the CD again but choose to do a repair install and it should sort it out and not require another key.