Installed Secondary HD, PC Now Wants to Load from CD/DVD, DBFailure

[Guardian Ares]

I recently installed a second HD. Everything worked fine until I tried to restart it this morning. I unplugged the second HD and started up my PC and the same thing... "Loading Operating System ..., Boot from CD/DVD :, DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

I went into BIOS and changed the boot priority to HD and changed the order. Same thing.

Luckily, almost everything I wanted to save I had transferred to my secondary HD. So if I have to do anything drastic I'm not too worried about it. But I'm still gonna lose some stuff.

Is there anyway I can fix this? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Update: I have a legit copy of Win7 Pro installed and it was all working fine last night. This problem just arose this morning. Luckily I found a System Recovery disk I made a while back and I'm trying that now. But if anyone has heard of this before and there's a simple/obvious solution I'd be very happy if you could help me out.

I used DiskPart to partition and format the second HD. The second disk had a previous Windows System installed on it from my previous PC, XP I believe. I'm hoping my primary HD didn't get formatted somehow. When I loaded the system recovery disc no current OS was listed that I could choose from to repair/restore. I tried to re-image my system but Windows says it cannot find a system image.

2nd update: So I used the system recovery disc to automatically repair startup (Can't remember exactly what it said). But now it booted up correctly.

If anyone can tell me exactly what I did and how I can avoid this... please. Thank you again. Being a novice sucks sometimes.

3rd update: So after I ran the startup repair on the system recovery disc I restarted my PC with the second HD unplugged. Booted up just fine. So I shutdown, reconnected my second drive, and then started up. Went into BIOS, made my primary drive the first HD to boot from, and then it started up just fine. I'm wondering if somehow the MBR or something else possibly got changed during this whole ordeal.

Anyways, problem solved, for now. But if anyone has any insight I'd still like to hear it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, if you do. And thanks for any replies.

 

[TVeblen]

Windows places special "boot files" on the partition marked as "ACTIVE". You can see this in Disk Management. The BIOS and Windows expects there to be only one ACTIVE partition.

When you installed the second hard drive with a previously installed OS on it you threw the system a curve because you now had 2 ACTIVE partitions with boot files on both of them.

Startup Repair was able to sort out the problem and chose the correct ACTIVE partition to use. I assume the ACTIVE flag was removed from the second hard drive.

That is my guess, and plausible explanation.

 

[Guardian Ares]

That's definitely possible. But I don't think that's exactly what happened. That issue came up in another thread and I used DiskPart to mark the second system install as inactive in order to re-format it.

But, that could have been what happened. I don't know if the previous system install was re-formatted or not. I'm not an avid user so I'm not sure either way.

Thank you for the input though.