New
#1
System won't boot after removing second hard drive, EFI?
So this I've never encountered, not sure what to think about it. Hopefully someone can give me a hand.
I re-installed windows 7 to a fresh hard drive, while keeping my old hard drive with old install of windows still in my computer so I could transfer any personal files over later.
Upon startup, Windows boot manager lets me choose the new windows installation (default) or the previous one. Both boot properly.
However, if I try and remove the old hard drive from the system, it just give me a black screen when I boot.
I've tried changing the boot order of the drives in bios; it's giving me 'windows boot manager' as default, which I assume is giving me the menu to choose OS. If I change it to boot the main hard drive first, and ignore the second hard drive, it does the same thing (not booting).
Did I screw something up ? Did installing windows with the second drive attatched write some part of the boot partition on the second HD (disclaimer: I know little about what windows uses to boot).
In disk management, what should I be expecting to see ? Currently I have disk 0 (C: one large NTFS partition with boot, page file, crash dump, and primary) and disk 1 (includes one 100MB partition for EFI System Partition, and one large NTFS partition for D: as a primary partition).
Am I correct in thinking that the EFI System Partition needs to be on the main drive ? I've since learned that's what Win 7 does apparently, if there's already an EFI System Partition anywhere on drives, it adds the new OS info to that.
So, short of reinstalling windows with only the main drive in, is there anything I can do to move it, or delete and restore it on the main drive ? I don't care about the second hard drive being bootable, but I'm not quite ready to format it (and am unsure what would even happen at this point if I did).
If anyone can guide me in what to do. If reinstalling windows is the only option, I'd rather just leave the ******* second drive in there and forget about it. Otherwise, since I've already set up this fresh install of windows exactly as I like it (I'm picky), and didn't really have the time to reinstall it and start again from scratch, is there a way to perfectly and reasonably easily back this up then restore it if I were to reinstall windows?
Any help would be appreciated. This is really doing my head in.
Thanks.