Unable to Boot without a Bootable Disc in the Drive

[Okran]

I have two HD drives, one SATA and one IDE, plus one SATA CD/DVD drive. Firstly I used to have XP on the SATA and Win7 on the IDE, but the IDE drive is smaller and slower and I wanted to essentially swap them over. The boot devices are set in the bios as CD/DVD first, SATA second, IDE third.

So I have installed XP first on the IDE and now Win7 on the SATA, but after I removed the Win7 DVD and restarted it is refusing to boot saying NO BOOT DEVICE DETECTED, INSERT SYSTEM DISK. Now if I place the Win7 dvd in the drive and ignore the PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD/DVD...., it will book fine.

This will surely fustrate non-technical users no end and some may not even think to try and replace the OS disk and try again.

I think I know what has happened, but more importantly how do I go and fix it to just boot without needing a damn boot disk everytime!?

Any sugguestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Zidane24]

I have two HD drives, one SATA and one IDE, plus one SATA CD/DVD drive. Firstly I used to have XP on the SATA and Win7 on the IDE, but the IDE drive is smaller and slower and I wanted to essentially swap them over. The boot devices are set in the bios as CD/DVD first, SATA second, IDE third.

So I have installed XP first on the IDE and now Win7 on the SATA, but after I removed the Win7 DVD and restarted it is refusing to boot saying NO BOOT DEVICE DETECTED, INSERT SYSTEM DISK. Now if I place the Win7 dvd in the drive and ignore the PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD/DVD...., it will book fine.

This will surely fustrate non-technical users no end and some may not even think to try and replace the OS disk and try again.

I think I know what has happened, but more importantly how do I go and fix it to just boot without needing a damn boot disk everytime!?

Any sugguestions would be greatly appreciated.

Check you BIOS and make sure that it is set to boot from the Win7 Drive first

 

[Okran]

Hi, thanks for the sugguestion. I just tried that and it said BOOTMGR IS MISSING and stops there. So I reset then hit F8, select DVD drive, then ignore the PRESS A KEY TO BOOT FROM DVD.... prompt to boot into Win7.

I just tried to Repair via the system repair option and viewed the details of the system startup recovery and it says my Win7 is set to D:\. This is incorrect, but it didn't find any problems so it didn't fix it. Will changing this to C:\ fix it and if so how do I change it please?

 

[SquonkSC]

Hi, thanks for the sugguestion. I just tried that and it said BOOTMGR IS MISSING and stops there. So I reset then hit F8, select DVD drive, then ignore the PRESS A KEY TO BOOT FROM DVD.... prompt to boot into Win7.

I just tried to Repair via the system repair option and viewed the details of the system startup recovery and it says my Win7 is set to D:\. This is incorrect, but it didn't find any problems so it didn't fix it. Will changing this to C:\ fix it and if so how do I change it please?

Well, since you changed the bootdrive in BIOS, the right drive is selected because now at least you get bootmgr missing instead of bootdisk missing.

Now just do another clean install of Win7 and you should be fine.

 

[bahn]

I had the "Insert system disk" error reinstalling Server2k3. It will only boot when the DVD in the drive. I had to reinstall it several times before i got it working right. I had burned my w2k3 at high speeds and when installing it said some files are missing so i inserted another copy of win2k3 (from another source) and the installation continued. When the install finished I removed the dvd then thats when the "insert system disk" problem started.

Try reburning your Win7 at the lowest possible speeds and reinstall

I also have 1 SATA and 1 IDE drive. My Server2k3 is on the SATA
win 7 is on the IDE. If the system startup recovery tells you that win7 is set to D:\ it will automatically change into C:\ when you boot into win7

 

[Zidane24]

The only thing he needs to do is reboot the computer...put the installation disc back in and boot that...choose repair computer and let it detect startup problems...after that he should be able to boot without the disk...np

 

[intrax]

Another experts trick on boot problems:

install EasyBCD on the WinXP drive and run from there. Now you can reinstall the Vista/Win7 bootloader and fix any boot troubles without reinstallation or repair from Win7. Only recommended for experts though !

Goodluck !

 

[Okran]

Cheers for all the advice.

I lost patience last night and tried easybcd and changed the xp drive to d: and the win7 to c:, then both systems failed to boot. :sarc:

So I first re-formated the IDE (xp) drive and re-installed xp, then I did the same with windows 7. Windows 7 had a problem after the first re-boot during the installation, said BOOTMGR IS MISSING again on a fresh install too...

I'll try the win7 system startup repair first and post back what I find.

 

[Okran]

Now just do another clean install of Win7 and you should be fine.

Just tried that, it's still doing the same

Try reburning your Win7 at the lowest possible speeds and reinstall

I burned mine a 2x speed so it's working fine, plus when I had XP on my SATA and win7 on my IDE I didn't get any problems.

The only thing he needs to do is reboot the computer...put the installation disc back in and boot that...choose repair computer and let it detect startup problems...after that he should be able to boot without the disk...np

Tried that just before, but it didn't detect any problems so it didn't fix anything.

Another experts trick on boot problems:

install EasyBCD on the WinXP drive and run from there. Now you can reinstall the Vista/Win7 bootloader and fix any boot troubles without reinstallation or repair from Win7. Only recommended for experts though !

Goodluck !

I'll get easyBCD back onto XP and try it out, looks like it's going to be the only way to fix it.

How crap is that though! I have to resort to using another parties software just to get win7 to boot as the primary device on my PC.

 

[Okran]

Well after some thought I decided not to try easyBCD first. Instead I tried a few things and eventually I got it to work.

As I installed XP first it was drive C:\, then when I installed Win7 it installed as D:\, however the boot loader was on C:. So this is why it wasn't working and I fixed it by swapping the boot priority in the bios to loading the XP drive first and viola.

Strange that I had to do that and that the boot loader wasn't loaded to the same drive where it was installed instead. It's a backwards setup but it works.

Thanks again for all your help and sugguestions.

 

[mogplus8]

Reprise of this problem

I know this post is very old, but I have the same problem.
To cut a long story short, I installed linux (kubuntu 10.4) into a separate partition on my sata drive. Had many issues with grub which would not boot linux or windows. Much later I deleted the linux partition and added the space to my windows drive (using Partition Wizard). My system still refuses to boot, and displays a grub error that the partition does not exist. Tried every option of bootrec but still get the grub error if the Windows dvd is not in the drive. I can boot if the disk is in the drive. Tried reinstalling Win7 on another partition hoping that would cure the bcd problem, but I still get the grub message. Eventually tried Easybcd, but that failed too and I still get the grub messge.
I'm no guru but I can't understand why having the win dvd in the drive affects the boot sequence. If you don't boot from the dvd, what does the bios boot from? Surely it's the hard disk? so how can it be different to booting without the win dvd in the drive???
But regardless of that, if anybody has any suggestions as to how to fix this problem I will be deeply grateful.
My current setup is: one ide 50gb drive with win xp allocated to E: drive. One 250Gb sata drive with two partitions. The first 150Gb (drive C: ) has my original Win 7 installation. The last 100Gb has another install of Win 7 and is allocated to F: drive. Mobo is a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H, 4 gig ram, amd am2 3600+ processor.
Dunno if it's relevant but I can't boot linux from a (live) cd. I tried the cd in my wife's computer and it fired up no problem, but when I try the same cd in mine it comes up with an initram error telling me there is no valid init file (or some such, I don't remember the exact error message). Eventually installed linux from a usb stick. Never had a problem with my win7 disk though.

Thanks,
Ian

 

[mogplus8]

[solved] Reprise of the old problem

Well, it seems I've fixed it. What I did was unplug my old 50Gb drive, ran bootrec with /fixmbr and /fixboot (for about the 50th time), and now I can boot successfully without my windows disk in the drive. Much fiddling with bcdedit (what a pain in the fundamental orifice! Is this the best microsoft can do?...) I finally managed to get the bootloader working the way I want it to. Haven't tried plugging the drive back in again, it had XP on it but I don't think it will boot any more, at least it didn't last time I tried it a while back, and bootrec didn't find it. So I suspect it's dead. Maybe the whole drive is no longer serviceable. don't know don't care really, I'll probably pull it out and chuck it one day.

Anyway, maybe this will help someone else with the same problem.

Cheers,
Ian

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello mogplus8, welcome to Seven Forums!



If you'd have started a new thread, someone would have helped you sooner but few people watch old threads.



The solution is out-lined in this tutorial at the link below for future reference.

The boot repair process is now automated for the Windows 7 installer to repair on its own.


Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

 

[mogplus8]

Thanks!

Hi Bare Foot Kid,

Thanks for the response and the link. I seriously hope I never need it again!

As I mentioned in my edited post, the problem has now gone away and my PC boots with no problem. Not only that, I can now burn a movie to dvd and boot linux from a cd! So all my problems have been solved by unplugging that drive. Not sure if I'm game to plug it back in again in case it fouls everything up again.

Anyway, plan B was to use Virtualbox to run Linux, but now that I can burn a dvd with Windows, not sure if I'll bother. Linux is fun to play with but causes even more frustration than Windows. I've played with Linux a lot over the years, and even had it as my primary OS for a while. But Win7 is good enough to make me wonder if it's really worth the effort. Maybe next time I have an hour or two to kill...

Cheers,
Ian

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello again Ian.



You can have the best of both worlds.

Have a look at Option Three of this tutorial at the link below for an out-line on a way to do a wipe "secure erase" to the other Hard Disk Drive (HDD) so that all the old data and OS code is removed; it over-writes every sector with zeroes so be sure to retrieve any data you don't want over-written first, also be sure you do the correct HDD, you don't want to do the wrong one.

Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD



Then have a look at this info below to see how to boot OS/HDD independently of each-other.

   Information

The easiest way to do away with boot issues between separate Operating Systems (OS) is to use the BIOS one time boot menu to select which OS to boot at system startup, each motherboard has an individual hot-key to tap during system start-up to access this menu.

If you have 2 separate Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and have one OS installed to one HDD and you want to install another OS to the second HDD, disconnect the HDD with the first OS installed on it and leave only the HDD you want to install the second OS to connected.
Just be sure not to change where the original HDD SATA cable was connected, it has to be re-connected to the exact same port to avoid boot issues.

Install the second OS to the connected HDD and when complete and the system is booting good, power down and reconnect the first HDD with the first OS on it.

This way the OSs will boot independently of each other and there will be no boot conflicts between the 2 separate OSs to have to sort later.

Then set the BIOS to boot the HDD / OS you want as default and if you want to start the other (new) OS you use the BIOS one-time boot menu to select that HDD / OS to start when the PC is started.

​

 

[mogplus8]

Another thought...

Thanks for the tip.

Have you ever had a thought that just floats around in the back of your brain, waiting for you to pay it some attention? I've had this thought wandering around the back of my brain, something I noticed in one of the links you gave me, and it wasn't until earlier today that it clicked. It was in the link about making a partition active. I scanned through it, and one statement finally made its presence felt. It was this: "However, the active partition on the first hard disk that your computer's BIOS detects is the one that will start the computer." The thing that finally found its way to my frontal lobes was the word "detects". Not the first disk in the boot order, but the first one the bios detects. Is that correct? If so what's the point of specifying a boot order in the bios?

If it is correct, then in my case that was my 50Gb ide hard drive, not my sata drive. So it seems to me that must have been the one all along that had the active partition and where the PC was trying to boot from, not the first partition of my sata drive where I was trying to do all the fixing, even though I had specified the sata drive as the first hard disk to boot from. So maybe when I disconnected the ide drive, the bios then detected my sata drive first, and waddya know, everything worked. I noticed another oddity, and it's been mentioned in a few other posts, that in the disk manager the two partitions on my sata drive were allocated E and F. My burner was drive D. No drive C. Didn't really take any notice of it at the time, if I had I might have twigged earlier. After I disconnected the ide drive and opened disk manager, the first partition on my sata drive had become the C drive.

Dunno if my conclusions are valid, but thought I'd pass it on in case it helps anyone else with similar problems.

Cheers,
Ian

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello Ian.



I wish we could have seen a snip of disk management while the other HDD was connected; it does happen that more than 1 partition "becomes active" for reasons we don't understand yet, it has happened to me.