Windows 7 error when booting

[lilrayray69]

Ok so I have two hard drives, one is SATA 500gb and the other is IDE 150gb. I had Windows 7 on the SATA and an old Ubuntu on the IDE hard drive. I hardly ever used Ubuntu and got tired of GRUB coming up every time I booted asking which OS I want so I decided to uninstall it. I wanted to go ahead and reformat the drive so I used an old Windows XP cd I have to reformat the 150g IDE drive. It wouldn't let me just reformat without installing XP so I went ahead and did that...

So now whenever I turn on the PC it automatically boots into Windows XP. In XP I can see both drives, my 500gb with all my files and Windows 7 and the 150gb with just XP on it. In my BIOS the SATA 500gb is set as the main hdd, and is set as #1 in the boot priority (IDE hdd is not anywhere in boot priority). When I bring up the boot list and choose the SATA HDD it just brings up a BIOS flasher, no Windows 7.

If I just unplug the IDE150gb HDD, I get a Windows error when I try to boot.

What's going on? The Windows 7 installation isn't corrupt as far as I can tell, it worked this morning when I still had Ubuntu/GRUB on the other hdd.

Also when I put in my Windows 7 DVD and boot from that, it loads files then comes to the blue windows 7 background screen and the mouse cursor shows loading for a few seconds then stops and nothing happens...The DVD looks completely scratch free and has worked before.

Edit: the exact message I get when trying to boot to my SATA 500gb HDD is:
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check booth path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and yo ur hardware reference manuals for additional information."

 

[gregrocker]

Mark Win7 partition or it's 100mb System Reserved partition (preferred if you have it) Active, then power down to unplug all other HD's. Boot into BIOS setup to make sure Win7 HD is set to boot first. Then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times until Win7 boots on its own and is marked System Active.

You can then plug back in XP HD, boot it when needed using one-time BIOS Boot Menu key at boot.

In the future keep your HD's independent like this by unplugging all other HD's during an install or repair. Set preferred OS HD to boot first in BIOS setup, boot the other(s) using one-time BIOS Boot menu key.

 

[whs]

Yeah, when you deleted the Grub you lost your Windows 7 bootmgr. The steps that Greg gave you should fix that.

You can also try these cmd commands - but only after you marked the 100MB partition (if available) or the Windows 7 partition as 'active'. And disconnect the IDE for the operation.

bootrec /FixMbr
bootrec /FixBoot
bootrec /RebuildBcd