Secondary drive left plugged in during install

A little background. I had/have a system with Windows installed on an SSD and a spin drive for storage. My SSD crashed so I RMA'd it. In the meanwhile I got another drive to use as my boot drive. Then I got my SSD back.

I installed Win 7 Pro 64 to my SSD. Unfortunately I forgot to unplug my secondary drive. Everything seemed fine until on restart I get two choices to boot to Windows 7. One works, and one doesn't. I looked in the BIOS and my SSD wasn't showing up as a boot option. When I force boot options (F11) on restart my Vertex SSD shows up, which only brings me back to the two Windows 7 options. I tried unplugging my secondary drive and it won't give me the option of booting from the SSD, so Windows doesn't even start up. I get some DOS boot loader talking about raids.

When I checked Disk Manager I got this:



I'm pretty new to this whole raid/partioning options thing, so I don't know what to do. It looks like it used BOTH of my drives (isn't that RAID 0?). My secondary drive has a lot of data that I don't want to lose. Windows boots fine (although I have to always pick the valid one to boot up) runs fine, and I can access all my old files on the secondary drive, but I want my SSD to be the ONLY boot and system drive. Re-installing Windows on the SSD is ok with me, but I don't want to lose access to my secondary drive or wipe it somehow. What can I do?

PS. I still have the temp system drive (a little WD notbook drive) with Windows still installed. I was planning on wiping it once everything looked good. Not sure if that helps my options but throwing it out there.

Only have one SSD. I have the SSD, my secondary HDD which has to be attached for Windows 7 to be recognized, and another boot HDD that I was using before I got my SSD back. I don't want to attach that other boot/system drive because it only has a previous Windows install on it, and it wasn't attached during this last install attempt.

I'll post that other stuff you asked for.

A little patience. My Windows install is installing 102 updates on restart. I'm posting this from my laptop.

Anyway. Drive C is my SSD, D is my DVD-rom drive, and E is my HDD. Not sure exactly what boot-up snapshots you want me to grab or how. In the BIOS config screen only my HDD and DVD show up in my boot options.

I should also note that on install my Windows disc showed me both my SSD and HDD as installation options, and I made sure to pick my SSD, and in advance settings the only install option I had for my SSD was "New".

Kaktussoft said:

mortalCoil said:

A little background. I had/have a system with Windows installed on an SSD and a spin drive for storage. My SSD crashed so I RMA'd it. In the meanwhile I got another drive to use as my boot drive. Then I got my SSD back.

I installed Win 7 Pro 64 to my SSD. Unfortunately I forgot to unplug my secondary drive. Everything seemed fine until on restart I get two choices to boot to Windows 7. One works, and one doesn't. I looked in the BIOS and my SSD wasn't showing up as a boot option. When I force boot options (F11) on restart my Vertex SSD shows up, which only brings me back to the two Windows 7 options. I tried unplugging my secondary drive and it won't give me the option of booting from the SSD, so Windows doesn't even start up. I get some DOS boot loader talking about raids.

When I checked Disk Manager I got this:



I'm pretty new to this whole raid/partioning options thing, so I don't know what to do. It looks like it used BOTH of my drives (isn't that RAID 0?). My secondary drive has a lot of data that I don't want to lose. Windows boots fine (although I have to always pick the valid one to boot up) runs fine, and I can access all my old files on the secondary drive, but I want my SSD to be the ONLY boot and system drive. Re-installing Windows on the SSD is ok with me, but I don't want to lose access to my secondary drive or wipe it somehow. What can I do?

PS. I still have the temp system drive (a little WD notbook drive) with Windows still installed. I was planning on wiping it once everything looked good. Not sure if that helps my options but throwing it out there.

E is a spinnig harddisk isn't it?
C is the ssd which starts succesfully?

You want to remove the not working bootmenu entry?
You want to make SSD boot on it's own even when spinning harddisk will be removed?

So you will all boot-related stuff to be copied from spinning disk to ssd?

I don't know what you want the final result is what you want

yes, I want to remove the non-working bootmenu entry.

Yes, I want to make my SSD bootable on it's own.

I'm not sure about the third question. I don't care how it gets done, but what I am trying to do is separate these two drives without losing my data on E, the HDD. If need be, I can backup most of that drive and just wipe it, but this will be the most time-consuming option. I have networked storage on a MyBookLive, and I still have that other 320gb drive but backing up all that data will be a pain.

It seems, due to my lack of experience in this area, that I might be missing something simple. Is it possible to somehow separate these two drives in Disk Manager? It doesn't seem so due to the boot-dependance I seem to have created.