Windows 7: Arrg! killed 1st OS partition in a dual boot and now nothing?

Yep. Shows how much I don't know. I built this machine using a caviar green HD and loaded Windows 7 64. It seemed pretty slow, so soon after I added a 128GB SSD and loaded Win 7 64. On start up I got the dual boot option and would just select the SSD as the main OS drive.
I got tired of the dual boot option and foolishly formatted the OS partition on the Caviar. Now on startup the machine cannot find the OS on the SSD. I has assumed with on OS on the caviar it would default to the SSD. Dumb me.

Please tell me I can rectify this with out reloading Win on the SSD. I finally got all my applications set up right.

I would try easybcd to see if you can fix the boot menu to point only at the ssd

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Solved! Used my Win 7 disk and Followed the instructions here:
Common Installation Problems and Their Solutions

will still look into EasyBCD though.

Hello CalypsoArt Welcome to the Seven Forums!

The basic wipe of the first WD Green Power model drive saw the boot files wiped as well as the first 7 install seen there having been the first drive on the system even with the second new install onto the SSD you added in.

Most likely you will need to perform another clean install to see the best results by first unplugging the WD GP drive to avoid the placement of the boot files there a second time. Once the drive was wiped the existing BCD store unless seeing the separate 100mb system reseverved partition was wiped as well leaving you with no option for rebuilding the orginal.

Just missed hearing the good news! Glad to hear that worked out for you!

The fix is always to mark Windows 7 Active, with all other HD's unplugged boot the Windows 7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots to write the MBR to Windows 7 partition.

Partition - Mark as Active
Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

The free EasyBCD program is mainly intended for editing the BCD store in Vista/7 especially when going to set up a dual boot with a previous version or even a Linux distro like ubuntu.

That has the option for first making a backup of the original mbr before proceeding in case anything goes wrong. But you first need to make it before the restore option can work.

You can also change the name of any entries for what will be displayed at startup on the boot options screen as well as lowering the default 30 seconds down for the amount of time the boot options screen is displayed before seeing the default OS begin loading.

You can also change which will be the default while keeping it set for 7(or Vista if not running 7) is recommended. The latest 2.0 version for both Vista and 7 is now available at Download EasyBCD 2.0.2 - NeoSmart Technologies