Greetings,
I built my rig a couple of months ago. I was going to clean one of my HDDs (I have Vista installed on that drive now, Seven is the only OS I want on here now) and noticed this.
How do I get the Seven drive to be #1 and change the Vista drive to #2 and the external HDD to #3? Or do I need to worry about that?
Thanks all. :)
I believe you would have to physically change the cables around inside your case. The disk number is decided by the BIOS depending on what SATA connector its connected too. Your OS might not boot up if you change it though. Even if you change the boot order in BIOS to match the moved disk it still might fail. If the drive letter changes as a result it will break all your installed programs etc as the registry will still be pointing to the old drive letter. If you want to try it, try it in steps. If you don't have your data backed up I'd do that first.
EDIT: Looked at it again after I posted and saw that your programs are on a Partition on Disk (0). Unplugging the Vista drive may break things in windows 7 so most of what I posted below likely won't work. Your best option is probably to back up your Data to external media and start over with a clean install and the disks connected the way you want them to show up.
Unplug the Vista drive (Drive 0) and leave Drive 1 where it is. Then see if windows 7 still loads. If it still works then you can format or do what ever you want to the Vista drive without messing up your windows 7 install. Then connect the windows 7 Drive to SATA 0, change your BIOS boot order to match and see what happens. If it doesn't work you should be able to swap it back to the original setup and boot up OK. If it was me I'd just wait till my next clean install and move things around then.
The better way to deal with this, is to disconnect all drives other than the one that you are installing on, until the install is complete, and then reconnect them afterward. This will require using the Boot Popup Menu, selected by using F8, or whatever is designed on the first screen of the BIOS run, to select the drive to boot to, rather than the OS. In the long run, it will prevent any problems typically caused by boot loaders, and is easier to use.
I had this happen on my rig too.
What I did was (because I have AHCI set) unplug the SATA connector from the second drive (while running) > restart > check Disk Management - Correct drive listed as Disk 0 > then hot plugged the second drive back in.
But I do not dual boot, so I see where Alpha is coming from. However I see that your W7 partition is marked as BOOT, so I think you would be OK.
I had a couple strange drive recognition issues after first installing W7. These have been corrected since installing the AHCI/RAID drivers for my motherboard from Asus, rather than counting on the generic AHCI driver that comes with Windows.
Also, I believe all SATA ports are treated equally by the system and OS. There is no disk hierarchy like in the legacy IDE system with masters and slaves. So while it is best practice to plug the first disk into Port 1, according to science, it shouldn't matter.
Or disconnect the Vista HDD....then boot to the recovery console and run fixboot and fixmbr from a command prompt...
Re-boot.
Or you could try this from Ted.
Partition : Recover Space Used by an Older OS
After I read your post I looked at mine. Mine are like yours also. It makes no difference. Why bother to change it?
I don't feel the need to change it unless I need to. Will it cause problems for me in the future? That's my only real concern.
After all this GREAT help and advice, I wish I'd thought to phrase my intial post like that. :)
You have me curious now. How many folks on here have their C: drive on something other than Disk 0 in the Disk Management window? I would bet it is pretty close to half.
Last edited by bigmck; 13 Mar 2011 at 13:53.
Mine is disk 3, which actually makes it disk 4, since it starts at 0.
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