force windows7 to ignore other drives & windows installations @ setup?


  1. 7point5
    Posts : 58
    windows
       New #1

    force windows7 to ignore other drives & windows installations @ setup?


    question's in the title

    when installing win7 on a new physical drive, on a pc with other physical drives (and windows on one of those other physical drives) win7 always modifies the existing windows installation (and its boot files) and creates a menu pointing to the new win7 install

    booting directly from the new drive is useless (even with win7 partition set to active, correct MBR & PBR) it says that no OS was found even though win7 is installed there. so I have to first boot from the older drive with the older windows first, then it chainboots into the new win7 installation on the new drive

    trying to hide the older drives in bios changes nothing win7 setup detects them anyway


    so other than opening the PC case & physically disconnecting the other drives, what's the solution?
      My Computer
    Quote Quote

  3. mrjimphelps
    Posts : 1,784
    Linux Mint 18.2 xfce 64-bit (VMWare host) / Windows 8.1 Pro 32-bit (VMWare guest)
       New #2

    I ALWAYS physically disconnect all drives except for the one I want to install Windows on. When you do this, you KNOW that the only drive Windows touched was the one that was connected, because it CAN'T touch any other drives.

    Some would disagree with me as to that being necessary. I respect their opinion; but in my view, if you want to make SURE that Windows doesn't touch any drives other than the one you're installing it on, unplug the other drives.
      My Computer
    Quote Quote

  4. AddRAM
    Posts : 13,576
    Windows 10 Pro x64
       New #3

    Trying to hide ? What does that mean.

    I simply disabled all the other drives in the Bios that I didn`t want to use, and Windows never saw them.

    But it takes less than 30 seconds to pull some power cables. And I agree that is the best way to do it.

    But when it comes to an M.2, that may not be so easy, so I disabled it, and the installer never saw it.

    I`ve never come across your issue though :) The boot menu always worked properly.

    But if you want it done right, then pull the power cables from the other drives, no need to touch the data cables unless you mark them, or you could easily screw up your drive order.
      My Computer
    Quote Quote

  6. 7point5
    Posts : 58
    windows
    Thread Starter
       New #4

    AddRAM said:
    Trying to hide ? What does that mean.

    I simply disabled all the other drives in the Bios that I didn`t want to use, and Windows never saw them.
    that's not possible (unless you've a very special & super strong bios)


    ok to say it clearly what I meant was, it's totally impossible to hide a hard drive from windows 7 setup without physically disconnecting it

    windows 7 (at least the setup part of it) is stronger than any bios out there it can see through anything AFAIK
      My Computer
    Quote Quote

 

  Related Discussions
I have been looking for the answer to the question like forever and to this day I cannot find solution that would completely solve the problem. Let me be straight from the beginning, I actually want to FORCE (!) any file to run without admin rights 100% of the time without any exceptions whats...
I have been trying to install a copy of an x86 version of Windows 7 Ultimate for weeks. For some reason when I first installed it It did not recognize my hard drives. I was ok with the upgrade at first (from Windows Vista Ultimate) but along with the disk space it is taking up from windows.old, I...
I have a household WiFi LAN (802.11 n) with a WD Netcenter NAS attached to the router via Ethernet. The NAS is divided into several drives, each of which has been mapped to a drive letter and marked for "reconnect at logon." I have an XP netbook and two W7 desktops on the network wirelessly. ...
Hi, I have two computers running windows 7 in a router LAN. One of the computers have several external drives connected to it. I have shared the drives successfully over the network and the settings remain saved so that I don't have to reshare the drives everytime I log in. However, three of...
I am attempting to install Windows 7 on an AlienWare M7700 D900T laptop, but setup will not recognize the hard drives. When first I boot up the laptop the hard drives are clearly detected, IDE busmaster is enabled. But then Windows 7 setup will not detect them. If I select the <Load Drivers> then...
Our Sites
Site Links
About Us
Windows 7 Forums is an independent web site and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Microsoft Corporation. "Windows 7" and related materials are trademarks of Microsoft Corp.

 © Designer Media Ltd
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 20:34.
Find Us