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Boot error after removing non booting hdd...
Hi all and thanks in advance if anyone can help.
I have a homebuilt system which has never let me down.
In short; I want to remove a drive from my pc but doing so causes a boot error. The drive I'm removing is not the boot drive, just storage.
The problem I have has just started as I have a acquired a Windows 7 Hom Premium upgrade disk with an old Dell PC. I am not, for other reasons using that code on the pc it came with. The main reason is that I have removed the hdd for another pc....this one. So I have upgraded the old XP install on this pc.
The system would not accept the license initially and kept saying it was wrong. Was the software aware it was not in the pc it should have been in by reading hardware signatures or something?
After leaving the pc on the license key screen for 12 hours i returned clicked to exit and the install booted up without a problem.
In this pc were two hdd's, one of which I have tried to remove and keep getting an error code on boot up.
Windows could not start....missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file
I have tried restores and repairs etc but figure that boot info was copied to the 500GB drive i want to remove.
I have reservations about doing another new install as the same trick may not work but want to add the 500GB of storage to the media centre pc downstairs to increase the storage capacity.