Start up failing after removal of second hard drive

theog · 01 Oct 2011

The only time you must mark the boot partition active, is when you make your own System Reserved partition.

Next time you remove the boot HD Drive, you can
Follow this base tutorial:
Help me get windows 7 to boot (again)

whs · 01 Oct 2011

After an installation one should always check where the active partition is. The Win7 installer has the habit of grabbing the first partition on the first frive it can find and place the bootmgr there. That is how mine ended up on a random HDD data partition when I installed on the SSD. Not a big deal though.

H3KT1C · 01 Oct 2011

whs said:

After an installation one should always check where the active partition is. The Win7 installer has the habit of grabbing the first partition on the first frive it can find and place the bootmgr there. That is how mine ended up on a random HDD data partition when I installed on the SSD. Not a big deal though.

From this I have learnt that one should only install Windows with one HDD to start of with then connect up any extras afterwards so then you don't run into this problem.

theog · 01 Oct 2011

That is why, you should always make the OS HD, disk0 & first HD boot in BIOS.

H3KT1C · 01 Oct 2011

theog said:

That is why, you should always make the OS HD, disk0 & first HD boot in BIOS.

Hmm, I'm just viewing the Windows Disk Management now and my OS HD is disk1, it is plugged into the first sata port though. I have got it set as my first boot drive in BIOS.

whs · 01 Oct 2011

Yeah, Disk0 and disconnect of the other HDDs are obvious measures. But what do you do if you cannot unplug the HDD cables because they are quasi frozen and access to the mobo is so tight that you cannot get to it. On my HP box I did it the right way, but this Dell box is a disaster..