Boot partition only installs on 2nd drive

gregrocker said:

If you unplug the drive with System reserved 100mb still on it, it will mess up your boot and not want to delete when you replug it. Better to delete it now using DISKPART commands given above, also pre-formatting DISK0 so no 100mb System Reserved partition will be offered - unless you want one. In that case, unplug DISK1.

Surley it dosen't matter if I'm gonna do a re-build from the DVD?

You said you plan to reinstall with DISK1 unplugged. Until it is deleted, it will have the 100mb System Reserved partition on it which has the MBR. Best to delete it using the DISKPART clean command since you will be booting the DVD anyway.

gregrocker said:

Cannot say why it is doing this, unless you are highlighting second drive when you first attempt to format, then changing to first drive to install.

I would delete the 100mb Sys Reserved before plugging it back in. Use the Diskpart commands given from DVD.

I had two unformatted disks, formatted disk0 only and choose it for installation of the OS, it happened. Went back ran installation for the second time tried to format both disks (in both orders) and noticed that it only warns me and creates it when I format Disk1?

That's the best I can explain what I'm doing.

You can use a partition manager to delete the 100mb partition on DISK1 before unplugging it for reinstall.

Win7 will not start, so do it as last step before booting DVD to reinstall 7.

Or use the DISKPART commands to clean DISK1 given earlier from the booted Win7 DVD, then shutdown, unplug it, reboot to Install to DISK0.

gregrocker said:

You said you plan to reinstall with DISK1 unplugged. Until it is deleted, it will have the 100mb System Reserved partition on it which has the MBR. Best to delete it using the DISKPART clean command since you will be booting the DVD anyway.

gregrocker said:

You can use a partition manager to delete the 100mb partition on DISK1 before unplugging it for reinstall.

Win7 will not start, so do it as last step before booting DVD to reinstall 7.

Or use the DISKPART commands to clean DISK1 given earlier from the booted Win7 DVD, then shutdown, unplug it, reboot to Install to DISK0.

Got you, though could I use this http://www.killdisk.com/ from within windows. It was quicker last time, when I had bad sectors and couldn't change the second disk from being active under the RC and should be ok again you reckon?

In fact if I remember (was a while ago), I think because I made disk0 active also, I could boot back into Windows, might be wrong though.

No, your MBR is placed on 100mb System Reserved partition so Win7 cannot start on its own until MBR is recovered using method I gave in my first post.

What's important is to delete the 100mb off of DISK1 before plugging it back in after reinstall to DISK0. Use 3rd party disk manager/cleaner in 7 or DISKPART commands given from booted Win7 DVD.

Yes, make it the last step in Windows since it won't restart. Or use the DVD to run Diskpart commands given.

gregrocker said:

Yes, make it the last step in Windows since it won't restart. Or use the DVD to run Diskpart commands given.

Thanks greatly for you're help and tolerance of my slow, tired brain, though I'm still very much in search of an answer as to why I'm suffering the route cause.

@gregrocker

Does this look right to you now?

(Disk1 is now Disk5)