Booting to another hard drive

[Pryach]

My computer yesterday was an XP machine with one hard drive. I wanted to test Windows 7 but I was afraid I would screw something up with my XP drive in the process. We'll call this Drive A.

Yesterday I bought a new hard drive, Drive B. I downloaded the Windows 7 ISO, got some drivers, and turned off my computer. I physically removed Drive A from the computer and put Drive B in. I started the computer and put the DVD in. Setup was fine, I had some trouble with getting the onboard NIC to work but I was able to overcome.

Now I needed to get back into my XP install to get some stuff done (play video games). I shut my computer down, pulled out Drive B, put Drive A back in and booted up. But I got a boot error message, and it looks like it's a Windows 7 Boot error message. How can this be if I removed the hard drive.

0xc000000e
The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible

It's almost as if my computer is trying to boot to Windows 7 even though I removed the hard drive containing the operating system. How do I get into my XP system? The drive is fine, I connected it as a slave and I can access the files on there. I'm guess Windows 7 makes some kind of change on the motherboard that forces it to boot to 7?

Thanks for any help!

 

[syrabert]

sounds in deed very strange, there is no way windows can write a boot loader in a bios-based machine.

are you really sure, that this was a win7 message? AFAIK this message is the same in XP, so it might be a misunderstanding.

Did you put the drive to the same connector? (e.g. sata1 or ata1) as before?

another thing came in my mind: was or is a memory stick connected to your machine?

If you have really a win7 message, there might be a rare chance, that the win installer had put something to the stick, what means your computer try to boot from this stick.