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Win7 won't boot after install w/o DVD using 2 HDD's
So, I have an interesting problem with installing Win 7 from XP. I'm doing a full install over the old XP drive.
I have an unusual hardware configuration. I have 2 HDD's, one is SATA, and the other is on a legacy IDE. The SATA drive is a WD Raptor which I use for the OS and the IDE is a slower, larger drive I use for storing data. Additionally, the IDE drive is the Slave on the IDE chain. In XP, this worked great, because the system would boot to the SATA drive and I could use both drives.
When I went to install 7, both drives appear in the list, but their letter names were reversed: the OS drive was listed as "D" and the data drive was listed as "C". I didn't think much of it until later. I installed on "D" which was the SATA drive. After install, I noticed that my IDE drive wasn't listed in file explorer. So I opened the Disk Manager and found that both drives were listed, but only the install disk was active. However, the IDE drive was Disk 0, and the SATA drive was Disk 1 and labeled "C:". I activated the IDE drive and it became "E:" (the DVD-ROM was already "D:"). I attempted to reboot and got an error "BOOTMGR is missing". If I put in the Win 7 install DVD it will boot to the SATA drive.
I read some of the other threads here and attempted fixes using "bootrec.exe" to no avail. I finally decided to reinstall again on the SATA drive. Again, 7 listed the SATA drive as Disk 1/"C:", and the IDE drive as Disk 0/(no letter). This time, I didn't activate the IDE drive and tried to reboot. New message "No system disk...". Put in the Win 7 DVD and it boots to the SATA drive.
My current theory is that Win7 is getting confused about the drive ordering when creating the boot sector on the drives. I ran out of time last night, but I thought I would unplug the IDE drive and do a fresh install on the SATA drive, then plug in the IDE drive after things were booting normally.
I did check the BIOS settings, and the SATA drive is listed first in the boot order.
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
AMD 4200+ CPU
OCZ 4GB RAM
(IDE) Hitachi 320GB
(SATA) WD Raptor 120GB
nVidia 7600GT
Can someone offer some advice on how to solve this so I don't need the Win 7 DVD in all the time?