Windows 7: Start up failing after removal of second hard drive

Hello,

I recently decided to remove one of my hard drives for use in another PC.

Ever since removal I have not been able to boot back into Windows, I just get a black screen with a flashing _ in the left hand top corner.



I have tried Startup Repair and also manually rebuilding the MBR.

The partition status when I have a look at it with Acronis Disk Director is also marked as Active, System and Boot.

I did notice at the bottom of the startup repair diagnosis and repair log that I have attached to this post that is says "Boot status indicates that the OS booted successfully."

It would be a great if someone could help me with this problem, it's really starting to drive me nuts now.

Ben.

As you removed your first HD Drive.



Do a Strartup Repair:
Startup Repair
Note: You may need to do startup repair 3 to 4 times.
Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

Okay I have tried Startup repair 14 times and still no progress, startup repair doesn't state that anything is wrong.

1) Use the Rebuild BCD in this tutorial:
How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows




2) Fix MBR.

Okay I done that, once I type bootrec /RebuildBcd it displays

Scanning all disks for Windows installations.

Please wait, since this may take a while...

Successfully scanned Windows installations.
Total identified Windows installations: 0
The operation completed successfully.

May be a video issue. Can you boot into safe mode? Hit F8 repeatedly at boot, then choose safe mode.

This is one thing about my motherboard that I find annoying, when I hit F8 repeatedly during boot it takes me to the motherboards boot menu to select which drive I'd like to boot from.

Some how I have managed to resolve this issue, using Acronis Disk Director what I did was deleted the volume then recovered the volume with Acronis Recovery Expert, rebooted and to my surprise it booted up windows no problem at all. The only thing I need to do now is edit the boot menu with EasyBCD 2.1 so I don't have wait 30 seconds or manually select the OS to boot up.

Thank you very much for your help though guys

I suspect that your active partition with the bootmgr was on that drive. If you want to run a startup repair on your C drive, you must first make it active. You can use the bootable CD of PW for that (last entry on the webpage): Free Download Magic Partition Manager Software - Partition Wizard Online

Hmm, I guess I was 1 minute too late.

Ah yes I think the bootmgr was on the drive that I removed.
I made sure the partition was marked as active with Acronis Disk Director bootable usb.
At first I did make the partition active using the DISKPART command.

Yes just a minute or two late.

It's very odd that removing the volume then restoring it solved the problem, just glad that's solved it, I really was not looking forward to do a clean install or even a restore from a backup as it was over 24hrs old. Now I know if even removing a HDD I should always do a full backup just in case.