Windows 7: Unable to Boot without a Bootable Disc in the Drive

I have two HD drives, one SATA and one IDE, plus one SATA CD/DVD drive. Firstly I used to have XP on the SATA and Windows 7 on the IDE, but the IDE drive is smaller and slower and I wanted to essentially swap them over. The boot devices are set in the bios as CD/DVD first, SATA second, IDE third.

So I have installed XP first on the IDE and now Windows 7 on the SATA, but after I removed the Windows 7 DVD and restarted it is refusing to boot saying NO BOOT DEVICE DETECTED, INSERT SYSTEM DISK. Now if I place the Windows 7 dvd in the drive and ignore the PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD/DVD...., it will book fine.

This will surely fustrate non-technical users no end and some may not even think to try and replace the OS disk and try again.

I think I know what has happened, but more importantly how do I go and fix it to just boot without needing a damn boot disk everytime!?

Any sugguestions would be greatly appreciated.

Check you BIOS and make sure that it is set to boot from the Windows 7 Drive first

Hi, thanks for the sugguestion. I just tried that and it said BOOTMGR IS MISSING and stops there. So I reset then hit F8, select DVD drive, then ignore the PRESS A KEY TO BOOT FROM DVD.... prompt to boot into Windows 7.

I just tried to Repair via the system repair option and viewed the details of the system startup recovery and it says my Windows 7 is set to D:\. This is incorrect, but it didn't find any problems so it didn't fix it. Will changing this to C:\ fix it and if so how do I change it please?

Well, since you changed the bootdrive in BIOS, the right drive is selected because now at least you get bootmgr missing instead of bootdisk missing.

Now just do another clean install of Windows 7 and you should be fine.

I had the "Insert system disk" error reinstalling Server2k3. It will only boot when the DVD in the drive. I had to reinstall it several times before i got it working right. I had burned my w2k3 at high speeds and when installing it said some files are missing so i inserted another copy of win2k3 (from another source) and the installation continued. When the install finished I removed the dvd then thats when the "insert system disk" problem started.

Try reburning your Windows 7 at the lowest possible speeds and reinstall

I also have 1 SATA and 1 IDE drive. My Server2k3 is on the SATA
win 7 is on the IDE. If the system startup recovery tells you that Windows 7 is set to D:\ it will automatically change into C:\ when you boot into Windows 7

The only thing he needs to do is reboot the computer...put the installation disc back in and boot that...choose repair computer and let it detect startup problems...after that he should be able to boot without the disk...np

Another experts trick on boot problems:

install EasyBCD on the WinXP drive and run from there. Now you can reinstall the Vista/Windows 7 bootloader and fix any boot troubles without reinstallation or repair from Windows 7. Only recommended for experts though !

Goodluck !

Cheers for all the advice.

I lost patience last night and tried easybcd and changed the xp drive to d: and the Windows 7 to c:, then both systems failed to boot.

So I first re-formated the IDE (xp) drive and re-installed xp, then I did the same with windows 7. Windows 7 had a problem after the first re-boot during the installation, said BOOTMGR IS MISSING again on a fresh install too...

I'll try the Windows 7 system startup repair first and post back what I find.

Just tried that, it's still doing the same


I burned mine a 2x speed so it's working fine, plus when I had XP on my SATA and Windows 7 on my IDE I didn't get any problems.


Tried that just before, but it didn't detect any problems so it didn't fix anything.


I'll get easyBCD back onto XP and try it out, looks like it's going to be the only way to fix it.

How crap is that though! I have to resort to using another parties software just to get Windows 7 to boot as the primary device on my PC.

Well after some thought I decided not to try easyBCD first. Instead I tried a few things and eventually I got it to work.

As I installed XP first it was drive C:\, then when I installed Windows 7 it installed as D:\, however the boot loader was on C:. So this is why it wasn't working and I fixed it by swapping the boot priority in the bios to loading the XP drive first and viola.

Strange that I had to do that and that the boot loader wasn't loaded to the same drive where it was installed instead. It's a backwards setup but it works.

Thanks again for all your help and sugguestions.