Choosing the default OS or removing an option...

mattsears18 · 03 Sep 2010

I have win7 installed on my computer. I'm helping a friend fix his computer. He has a netbook with no DVD drive and I couldn't find my external DVD drive. I plugged his hard drive into my computer to access it. I successfully installed windows to his hard drive form my computer. I then removed the drive and will place it back in his computer soon.

Problem is... now when my computer boots it tries to boot from the win7 installation I did to his hard drive. I get an error saying that the drive has been removed or is not accessible or whatever. Obviously that's because I removed it.

Question is... can I change the default OS to boot from? I have 2 win7 options (mine and the installation I just did on his). Can I remove the option to boot from the recent installation I did on his hard drive?

Many thanks in advance!!

**cluberti** · 03 Sep 2010

Yes, although if your system shows his HDD to boot from, I'm guessing the Win7 install on that HDD doesn't have boot info and you're going to run into problems when you put it into his machine - and without a DVD to boot from, you aren't going to be able to run fixmbr or run a boot repair from the setup either to fix it. I'd suggest (strongly) putting the Win7 DVD on a USB key and installing with the HDD in his netbook.

As to removing the option, yes. There's a tool you can run from a command prompt called bcdedit which allows you to modify the boot options for your system. You would run bcdedit /enum to get a list of boot options on your system, and then bcdedit /delete {<insert GUID here of boot object from list>} to remove a boot option.