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

[7point5]

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?

 

[mrjimphelps]

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.

 

[AddRAM]

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.

 

[7point5]

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