Windows 7: Installed a Notebook drive now W7 cant live without it & hid it

Installed a Notebook drive now Windows 7 cant live without it & hid it. Had a notebook drive I wanted to back some file up on. I put in my Windows 7 computer now Windows 7 will no longer boot from C it will only boot if you go to the boot menu and start with this other drive. I cannot read the drive with any of the file reading programs. The drive shows in the hardware configuration only but cannot access it. Any ideas?

Hello manazuma, Welcome to the Forum.

I assume everything is fine if you remove the second drive?

My guess is that the second drive has an operating system on it. The laptop boots and can't tell which drive to start, so it asks you.
Once started the OS tends to ignore the partition the non-operating OS is on.

If this is the case, then your solutions would be:

• Format the second drive to erase all old files on it - to use as a data drive.
• Remove the ACTIVE flag on the OS partition of the second drive - keep all files intact.
• Partition the second drive - OS & DATA - and leave only the OS and programs on the OS partition, use the DATA partition as normal, and choose which drive to boot each time you start your computer.

Actually the small drive was formatted before I installed it and it has nothing recorded on it. Again my computer will only start up if you choose the small empty drive as boot 1. But everything is installed on drive C: Drive C: worked fine by itself until I installed the small drive. I could never access the small drive from MY Computer or any other program. Then when I removed the snall drive the computer would not boot.

It sounds like the boot files Windows needs were installed on a System Reserved partition on the small drive and all the Windows system files were installed on the C: drive.

This would mean the small drive has been flagged as ACTIVE and the C: drive is not. You would need to mark the C: drive as active in Disk Management before doing the process described below. Do not mark C: as active unless you are going to remove the small drive.

You can correct the boot problem by uninstalling the small drive and then boot with your Windows 7 installation DVD (DVD first in the boot order) and run Startup Repair 3 or 4 times.
Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

This will install the correct boot files on the C: drive so the system will boot without the small drive attached. Then you will need to un-mark the small drive as ACTIVE and format it again to erase the old boot files.

And just to be sure: you are talking about 2 separate, physical hard disk drives, right?
Not to be confused with 2 "drives" that are actually partitions on one physical hard disk drive.