Win 7 & any other OS Problem booting

[Cliff789]

Or no OS too.

On one main board Asus x79 Deluxe
All drives are in bays and there are no internal drives.
Win 7 loaded to one hard drive
Ubuntu on a second HD
A blank formatted HD for a third

Only one HD in the bays at a time

Boot to Win 7 Everything is fine
Shut down
Pull the Win 7 HD
Install either of the other HDs
Boot to either of the other HDs

result:
BLACK SCREEN OF DEATH with error message telling me that it's probably a hardware problem and to insert my OS disk for repair.
Once windows loads from the OS disk and I select repair the fix is almost instantaneous.

Repeat the sequence above and the same black screen of death appears.

What is happening?
Is Win 7 writing something to my Mainboard? Sure seems like it. And whatever is written to the main board has some thing about the MBR of the Win 7 disk and when any other disk is inserted as the only (Primary/Master) drive then that drive's MBR contaminates the prior writing and confuses things?

 

[bigmck]

Or no OS too.

On one main board Asus x79 Deluxe
All drives are in bays and there are no internal drives.
Win 7 loaded to one hard drive
Ubuntu on a second HD
A blank formatted HD for a third

Do you mean there are no EXTERNAL drives?

 

[Cliff789]

Do you mean there are no EXTERNAL drives?

I try to be very precise with language. There are no internal drives.
All the drives are removable, there are no fixed drives, I can remove all the drives that go in this PC VIA the bays.

And this is not a dual boot set up. Dual boot would have all the OSs on the same disk. I am exchanging disks with different OSs on each.

My thinking is that maybe the OS is writing something to the Bootstrap Loader in the ROM. That is the most likely thing, I should think.

 

[bigmck]

I try to be very precise with language.

Pardon me.............

 

[Viscon]

Sorry but there must be some misunderstanding here.
Are your drives connected to SATA ports on your mobo? If so, they are actually internal ones.
My understanding is external drives can be connected through USB or eSATA.

Also dual boot system can exist on two separate physical drives just like in my case.
I have two drives, each one has an OS installed and I still dare to consider it dual boot.
Anyway that's not a case here.

I'm not sure if the OS can write anything into mobo BIOS, but in your case it might be that you setup Windows 7 in UEFI mode. That's why win7 boots fine.
Now Ubuntu setup might produce some problems in booting routine just because of UEFI.
I suspect this scenario because I heard of these kind of problems.
However, since I'm not familiar enough with UEFI mode I can not go any longer with my speculations.
It's that I try to give just a hint.
I'm sure though there are people here who have enough knowledge to help further.

 

[Cliff789]

Well it's like this:
To begin with you are doing something very different from me.
You have your OS systems nicely assigned each to their own SATA port. So each of your OS drives has a home.

I was screwing the pooch on that score. Damn dog has never looked happier. See below


My MOBO uses BIOS/UEFI and subsequent that and (I been doin' lots of reading - nobody ever makes this easy) I learned that the SATA ports are sensitive to which one is being used for an OS drive. Something gets written to the ROM in a UEFI environment - I'm guessing some identifier from the MBR, but I truly don't know. that something causes the mainboard to expect to see the OS in a particular SATA port. When it doesn't all hell breaks loose and dwarfs and gnomes bite your ankles under your desk.

My problem was that I was inserting my two different HDs into the same bay thus creating this confusion in the SATA port.

The solution was to use a different Bay for each drive.
So I shut the system down and pull one drive and put another into a different bay. Using say for example Bat (a) for drive (a) and bay (b) for drive (b) lets me boot without the problem.


As to this:
"Are your drives connected to SATA ports on your mobo? If so, they are actually internal ones."

Not true if you have drive bays which I do. I didn't mount any drives internally exactly because I wanted to do what I am doing.

Drive bay:


I just open the door and pop a drive in or out. I have 4 of these.
I like them way far better than internal drives.

Now I can run Ubuntu in one and Win 7 in the other.
I gotta say I am liking Ubuntu rather a lot.

As to the notion of Dual boot.
This is not dual boot.

Dual boot operators usually load both OS to the same HD. That would defeat my purpose. So too would having both OS drives in the computer at the same time. You have separate drives. Interesting. I wonder what would happen is you used a RAID 10 configuration.

What I'm doing is this:

I surf where no sane person should ever go. I GuaranDamTee that if mommy were to catch me surfing where I go, I'd get my rear end tanned good. And it goes without sayiong that every imaginable virus worm trojan and sundry malware is waiting for me in those dark nasty places of the web.

So I use Ubuntu to go surfing and linux doesn't use .exe to execute a file any action in a linux system has to have administrator privileges or it' a no go. Even the administrator user doesn't have those privileges because linux forces him to enter a password each and every time. The virus and malware hasn't got that password so it's dead on arrival.

There's a second part:
On the off chance that I get hacked or whatever and bad things happen, I can just Format the drive burning the whole house down and start over. No loss of important data coz the good data never gets exposed to the malware. I could throw away the drive too and it's cheap cheap cheap coz I don't buy top of the line drives for this, I get factory refurb drives.

 

[Viscon]

So it might be an UEFI setup making all problems after all.
As I said I'm not familiar enough with it to solve an issue.
Btw that's why I decided to give UEFI a pass here although my mobo supports it.

As for the drives and the way you mount them.
Looks like you have standard ones connected to SATA ports but somehow "externally", no?
If any of them was connected via USB for example, booting from it would require making changes in boot order and/or priority in BIOS.
But looks like this is not the case.
Interesting solution by the way you have there.

Let's see what other forum members can say about UEFI itself.
I'm also interested in this subject.

 

[Cliff789]

Yah the way those bays work is you install them in your case in the large openings where the case lets you put big things like optical drives.
You hook the power and SATA to the bay itself inside the computer case.
There is a hinged door that opens the bay so from the front of the case you have access to the bay. Insert a SATA drive it plugs in sweetly to the back of the bay and away you go.
I can hot swap drives with data on them while the computer is running and it locates them and loads them.

If you can put some in your case you will like them rather a lot.

UEFI is the way of the foreseeable future IT won't completely replace the Bios but it's taking over most of the turf.
Here, read this
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/381565/uefi-bios-explained